Deep Album Cuts Vol. 271: Blondie

Friday, August 26, 2022






Today Numero Group has released Against The Odds: 1974 - 1982, a box set collecting Blondie's first six albums and a whole lot of previously unreleased material. And a few months ago I read Kembrew McLeod's 33 1/3 book on Parallel Lines, so I have been thinking about Blondie and their place in the world lately. 

Blondie deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Rifle Range
2. In The Sun
3. Platinum Blonde
4. Detroit 442
5. Bermuda Triangle Blues
6. Love At The Pier
7. I Didn't Have The Nerve To Say No
8. Fade Away And Radiate
9. Pretty Baby
10. 11:59
11. Will Anything Happen
12. Accidents Never Happen
13. Shayla
14. Eat To The Beat
15. Living In The Real World
16. Angels On The Balcony
17. Do The Dark
18. Europa
19. Live It Up
20. For Your Eyes Only
21. (Can't I) Find The Right Words (To Say)
22. Rave
23. Fragments

Tracks 1, 2 and 3 from Blondie (1976)
Tracks 4, 5, 6 and 7 from Plastic Letters (1977)
Tracks 8, 9, 10 and 11 from Parallel Lines (1978)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from Eat To The Beat (1979)
Tracks 16, 17, 18 and 19 from Autoamerican (1980)
Tracks 20 and 21 from The Hunter (1982)
Track 22 from Ghosts of Download (2014)
Track 23 from Pollinator (2017)

In the firmament of bands that launched their careers at CBGB in the mid-'70s, Patti Smith was the first one out of the gate with a major label album, The Ramones became the standard bearers of the punk rock genre, and Talking Heads sold the most albums and were the most reliable critical darlings. For a time, Blondie were the black sheep of that scene, and by critical standards they're not usually considered as important or influential as their peers. But they became pop stars to a far greater degree, hitting #1 on the Hot 100 four times (by comparison, only one other CBGB band, Talking Heads, had one top 10 hit, a year after Blondie's breakup). 

Singer Debbie Harry and guitarist Chris Stein, who were a couple throughout Blondie's original run but split up in the '80s a few years after the band, are kind of the braintrust at the center of the band and one or both of them wrote most of Blondie's hits that weren't covers -- "Platinum Blonde" was the first song Harry ever wrote, one of a handful of songs on Blondie's debut that originated in their earlier band The Stilettoes, a retro girl group with three singers.  

But a lot of members of Blondie made significant songwriting contributions, including keyboardist Jimmy Destri and bassists Gary Valentine, Nigel Harrison, and Leigh Foxx. Drummer Clem Burke doesn't have any writing credits, but he's absolutely the glue that holds together every era of Blondie -- when people say a drummer can be the difference between a good band and a great band, Clem Burke is a classic example. His energy and creativity drives the fast early stuff and helped them pull off their many genre experiments later on. 

The most played deep cuts in Blondie's live repertoire include "Fade Away And Radiate" (which had guitar from Robert Fripp on the studio recording), "Accidents Never Happen," "In The Sun," "Will Anything Happen," "Detroit 442," "Pretty Baby," "11:59," and "Shayla." "For Your Eyes Only" was written for the James Bond film of the same name -- Debbie Harry was hired to sing the theme song eventually performed by Sheena Easton, but quit when she and Blondie weren't allowed to record their own original song, so they put it on The Hunter. I would say Blondie easily had the better song, and the one that sounds more like a Bond theme, so the Eon Productions people made the wrong call there. 

Blondie have made 5 studio albums since reuniting, but the first three (1999's No Exit, 2003's The Curse of Blondie, and 2011's Panic Of Girls) are all currently missing from streaming services. 2014's Ghosts of Download was bundled together with a greatest hits collection. The story behind "Fragments" from the band's latest album Pollinator is pretty cool -- Chris Stein found this obscure self-released song by a Canadian band on YouTube, and Blondie decided to cover it. 

11:08 AM

Thursday, August 25, 2022






I appeared on the Rap Rankings podcast for the 2nd time this week, for the episode where they analyzed Future's 2014 mixtape Monster. You can hear it on Spotify, Apple, or Google Podcasts, I'm in the 6th hour of the episode (I know, they're very long), talking about "After That" and the history of Future/Lil Wayne collaborations and the Kill Bill siren. 

8:14 AM

TV Diary

Tuesday, August 23, 2022






a) "Five Days At Memorial"
This Apple TV+ miniseries is about a New Orleans hospital where 45 people died in the days following Hurricane Katrina. And while I think that telling true stories, including tragic ones, can be done well, and this series is very well made, I have found myself pretty uncomfortable with this one. It's well acted, with Julie Ann Emery a standout in an impressive cast that includes Vera Farmiga and Cherry Jones. And it takes an unflinching look at the micro and macro decisions at the local, national, and corporate levels that made things so much more awful than they should have been in that situation. But at some point, seeing the CGI floodwaters roll over New Orleans like a Roland Emmerich disaster movie, watching a soundstage replica of Memorial Medical Center lose power and become filthy, chaotic, and flooded...the artifice of it all, and the strangeness of watching an expensive reenactment a such a horrific chapter of history, it just feels unsettling to me in ways not intended by the people who made this. A lot of people flinched at the idea of watching something like "Station Eleven" during a real pandemic, but that series had a lot of warmth and humanity to offset the dark stuff, here it's just all bad, getting harder to watch with every episode, and I know I'm not doing anything noble or necessary by watching it. 

b) "The Resort"
This Peacock show is a mystery comedy where Cristin Milioti and William Jackson Harper (or, as my wife calls them, 'The Mother and Chidi') play a troubled married couple who go on vacation in Mexico, and bond over trying to solve a mystery involving a couple college kids who disappeared at the resort 15 years earlier. And what really makes the show work is that the flashbacks make you really care about the missing tourists (played by Skyler Gisondo from "Santa Clarita Diet" and adorable newcomer Nina Bloomgarden), although so far it's still such a rambling, unpredictable shaggy dog story that I have no idea if this thing is going to have a satisfying conclusion. I'm enjoying the ride, though, especially the most recent episode where Luis Guzman shows up as a reclusive eccentric author. 

c) "A League of Their Own"
I really love A League of Their Own, just a thoroughly enjoyable movie. So I'm a little wary of turning it into a series, but I have to admit it fits perfectly into the TV landscape right now. As I wrote here last month, "there have been so many period pieces about woman trailblazers in male-dominated industries, sometimes in parallel to real life figures but not really closely based on them," including "GLOW" (which I compared to A League of Their Own when it first aired), "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel," "Physical," and "Minx." But Abbi Jacobson is leading a great cast and there's a lot of potential here. D'Arcy Carden on "The Good Place" was one of the best TV performances in recent memory and I'm really happy to see her in a leading role where she doesn't play a computer. 

d) "The Sandman"
I remember The Sandman being a big deal in the '90s, and I know there'd been attempts to adapt it forever, but I never read it. In fact, the only Neil Gaiman thing I ever read was Good Omens, which was already turned into a pretty good series. People seem to be pretty happy with this adaptation, but for me, without having the frame of reference, it feels like it's off to a pretty slow start after an episode or two. The visual effects are a mixed bag, some scenes look amazing, some scenes kinda look like crap.

e) "This Fool"
In "This Fool," comedian Chris Estrada plays a kind of goofily square guy from South Central L.A. who works with a program called 'Hugs Not Thugs' that helps rehabilitate former gang bangers including his cousin, played by comedian Frankie Quinones. It all feels a little broad and maybe stereotype-driven, but there's some funny dialogue and sharp scenes, including Michael Imperioli and Michelle Ortiz in good supporting roles, so there's potential there. 

f) "Bump"
This Australian dramedy about a pregnant teenager started airing in America on The CW, and it's pretty charming with good cast, although the production values look kind of shoddy compared to U.S. shows. 

This British import on Peacock is a thriller about government cybercrime analysts, and it kind of feels like a serious version of Peacock's last British show about government cybercrime analysts, the broad comedy "Intelligence." 

Michelle Monaghan was great enough in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and a couple of other things that I'm forever rooting for her to get bigger, more interesting roles than she usually gets. And "Echoes" has a big, juicy role for her -- two actually, as twin sisters who secretly switch lives (and jobs, and husbands) every now and again, until one of them disappears. Leni leaves clues for Gina that she has decided to simply pick up and leave, and Gina poses as both of them while trying to get to the bottom of what her sister was doing. It's an intriguing story after a couple episodes, but so far the execution is a little soapier than I'd like, I'm hoping it lives up to its potential since Monaghan's projects so rarely have. 

"Surface" is another sort of psychological mystery miniseries, starring Gugu Mbatha-Raw, who was in another psychological mystery miniseries, "The Girl Before," earlier this year that wound up being pretty underwhelming. I don't love stories where everything kind of hinges on one character having a conveniently specific kind of memory loss, which Mbatha-Raw has after an apparent suicide attempt that, she starts to find out, may have actually been a murder attempt. So I don't feel especially compelled to see this one through to the end, although I may because Mbatha-Raw is so strikingly beautiful. 

j) "Uncoupled"
Neil Patrick Harris is probably one of the most prominent openly gay actors who has played straight characters in practically all of the roles he's known for. So "Uncoupled" feels overdue as an NPH vehicle where he plays a gay protagonist, a middle-aged guy who's just been abruptly dumped by his boyfriend of 17 years. But it's created by Darren Starr, who's made a long line of shows I find completely dull and off-putting ("90210," "Sex And The City," "Emily In Paris"), and the first episode felt pretty unpromising to me. 

k) "I Am Groot"
Disney+ recently premiered this little series of 5 shorts, you can watch all of them in a half hour, I don't know why they didn't just make it a whole proper series given the popularity of Baby Groot. I feel like the character loses something with a lower CGI budget than the "Guardians" movies had, to say nothing of not having all the other characters to bounce off of, but they're cute little cartoons. 

l) "Endless Night"
This French series on Netflix is kind of Nightmare on Elm Street deal, with a monster that hunts teenagers in their dreams, with the twist that it happened after they took a weird experimental drug. I've only watched one episode so far but pretty creepy stuff. 

This Korean show on Netflix is about a professor who becomes a drug courier in order to provide for his family, so obviously it's going to garner a lot of comparisons to "Breaking Bad," although tonally it doesn't seem to be headed in the same kind of tortured antihero direction at least. 

This Netflix telanovela about sexy firefighters is pretty ridiculous, although I'm not sure if it's any more ridiculous than American sexy firefighter shows like "Chicago Fire" and "9-1-1." 

I was recently sent screeners for this Epix miniseries, which has 4 episodes, each one a profile of Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Ron Wood, and Charlie Watts. And I was eager to watch the final episode about Watts, which airs next week, hoping that they completed some interviews with him before he passed away last year. Unfortunately, they did not, but the episode is a lovely tribute full of great revealing moments. Watts collected the drum sets of legendary jazz and rock drummers, and there's a cool scene where two of his oldest friends go through his collection after he passed away. They also talk to his tailor and show all his suits and some suits he was having made before he died that he never got to wear, and Keith's interviews for the episode are as emotional as I've ever seen him. It's a pretty cool series, the Mick and Keith episodes are obviously interesting but even the Ronnie episode is a revealing look at a guy that you don't necessarily know as much about. One subtle thing I liked about the show is that the visuals of the show are driven by on-camera interviews with the Stones, and footage of their concerts and old TV appearances, but all the other musicians offering commentary (Tina Turner, Slash, Rod Stewart, etc.) appear via voiceover. 

It really feels like overkill that there have been two recent documentary projects about Woodstock '99, although I didn't see the HBO one so it didn't feel too redundant for me personally to check out this one. It feels like it kind of falls between making too much of things, acting as if this was a singular awful concert situation when we see things like the Astroworld tragedy happen all too often, and also somehow not taking it seriously enough -- like some of the people responsible for this shitshow get to sit in comfortable chairs and talk on camera about the mistakes they made but they're probably never going to experience any consequences. Also, it annoys me that the show is full of '90s rock including bands that didn't play the festival -- like, Blur wasn't there, don't drag them into this. 

This whole Faye Yager story is really engrossing and strange, I haven't finished the series so I don't know all the details yet but I'm surprised I didn't hear more about this back when it was happening. 

Another chilling true crime docuseries, this one about a 17-year-old who shot his father, I try not to watch a lot of this stuff but I understand why some people get addicted to it, going down the rabbit hole of a case and wanting to know every detail and feel some certainty about the truth of what happened. 

Lately the Warner-Discovery merger has gotten a lot of attention because of the fallout of HBO Max pulling a ton of shows and movies, but there have been effects in a lot of other places, including TBS and TruTV becoming complete content deserts with no new programming. So it's a little surprising that one new show got on the air on TruTV recently, this goofy travel show that, I'm guessing, will not survive long enough to make 101 episodes. Adam Pally was very funny on "Happy Endings" but he can be a little obnoxious in other contexts, and it feels like he made this show as an excuse to hang out with his most obnoxious friend, a comedian named Jon Gabrus who is apparently also on MTV's awful "Guy Code." The show is fun sometimes, though, especially when they go around finding fun things to do in places you don't really think of as a party town like Richmond, Virginia. 

It's a sign of how instant a hit "Abbott Elementary" was that within 6 months of it debuting, ABC already had one of its stars, Janelle James, hosting a game show too. "The Final Straw" is a pretty silly show, basically a super-sized version of Jenga where people try to remove objects from these big goofy towers without them falling over. Watching it actually made me crave playing Jenga, and we had a good round of Jenga with my wife's family on vacation a couple weeks ago. 

I like the idea of Netflix's twist on the old home renovation show formula, where they do these lightning round renovations in 12 hours. Feels kind of stressful just to think about how they execute it, but it makes for good TV. 

v) "The Outlaws"
The first season of the British comedy "The Outlaws" was filming way back in spring 2020 when Covid hit. But it got renewed for a second season while production was suspended, and then they went back and shot both seasons back-to-back, which Amazon released in America just 4 months apart. I like it, but I can't shake the feeling that the cast is better than the show, particularly Darren Boyd, who's better on "Trying," and Christopher Walken, who's better in a hundred other things. 

w) "Trying"
Although I realize that there are lots of people who want kids but have trouble having them the old-fashioned way, and there are stories to tell about that, it so often feels like TV shows introduce those kinds of storylines as some kind of elaborate form of stalling or keeping the characters in stasis -- we want these characters to want kids, but we don't actually want the show to be about parents of small children, so let's prolong the process as much as possible. So on paper, the British series "Trying" initially felt like that trope expanded out to an entire series. But by the end of the second season, the show had found its comedic voice, and the characters got to adopt two children, and by that point I was really rooting for them and foud it all very emotionally affecting. Now in the third season, they've got to actually deal with being parents and getting a lot of reality checks, but it's still a very warm, funny show, I'm glad they didn't keep stringing the characters along without becoming parents for more than a couple seasons. Also, Robyn Cara's character Jen has been in the show sporadically since the beginning, but I feel like they've really found her voice over time and she's one of the funniest parts of the show now. 

x) "Locke & Key"
"Locke & Key" came back for its third and final season Netflix, and this is one of those situations where three is a good number. I never quite got into all its lore enough to really want to see this story go on forever, and Emilia Jones is probably ready to do a lot of movies after the success of CODA. 

y) "Never Have I Ever"
"Never Have I Ever" has been renewed for a 4th and final season, and I can't remember the last time a Netflix show that wasn't a huge popular phenomenon got that many seasons, so honestly, good for them. It's really grown on me, I think it's one of the best high school sitcoms in years, really smart writing and likable characters. 

z) "What We Do In The Shadows"
As a show like this gets into its 4th season, it's fun to see how much more bizarre they can make a show that was pretty ridiculous to begin with. And at this point, Colin Robinson has died, but the infant son that burst out of his chest, a child with the face of middle-aged Mark Proksh, is aging rapidly, and is now a Roblox-obsessed tween. The "who'll come first on the wedding night" bit a couple weeks ago was amazing, the funniest song from a TV show since "Misbehavin'" from "The Righteous Gemstones." 

8:53 AM

Sunday, August 21, 2022





Today is Joe Stummer's 70th birthday, and I made a list of his 10 best non-Clash tracks for Spin. 

12:25 PM

Saturday, August 20, 2022






I ranked every R.E.M. album for Spin. 

10:10 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 270: Olivia Newton-John

Friday, August 19, 2022






Olivia Newton-John passed away last week, and by all accounts was an absolutely wonderful person, and made some huge songs that will live forever. But like a lot of people of my generation, I grew up only really knowing her for Grease and "Physical" (which was the #1 song on the day I was born!), and it had surprised me to learn that she was primarily a country singer before that era. So I wanted to dig into her catalog and get a better sense of her music. 

Olivia Newton-John deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Love Song
2. Changes
3. Why Don't You Write Me
4. Rosewater
5. Loving You Ain't Easy
6. The River's Too Wide
7. Life Stream
8. I Never Did Sing You A Love Song
9. Lovers
10. It'll Be Me
11. Love You Hold The Key
12. Don't Ask A Friend
13. Sad Songs
14. Look At Me I'm Sandra Dee (reprise)
15. We Go Together (with John Travolta)
16. Borrowed Time
17. Talk To Me
18. Suspended In Time
19. The Promise (The Dolphin Song)
20. Stranger's Touch
21. Carried Away
22. Shaking You
23. Queen Of The Publication

Track 1 from If Not For You (1971)
Tracks 2 and 3 from Olivia (1972)
Track 4 from Music Makes My Day (1973)
Track 1 from Let Me Be There (1973)
Tracks 5 and 6 from Long Live Love (1974)
Track 2 from If You Love Me, Let Me Know (1974)
Tracks 7 and 8 from Have You Never Been Mellow (1975)
Track 9 from Clearly Love (1975)
Track 10 from Come On Over (1976)
Track 11 from Don't Stop Believin' (1976)
Tracks 12 and 13 from Making A Good Thing Better (1977)
Tracks 14 and 15 from Grease: The Original Soundtrack From The Motion Picture (1978)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Totally Hot (1978)
Track 18 from Xanadu (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) (1980)
Tracks 19, 20 and 21 from Physical (1981)
Track 22 from Two Of A Kind: Music From The Original Motion Picture Soundtrack (1983)
Track 23 from Soul Kiss (1985)

Olivia Newton-John was born in England, and moved to Australia as a child. And somehow from that background, she became one of the biggest non-American singers in country music in the 1970s. She scored seven top 10 country hits before the success of Grease moved her music into a more pop crossover direction. And honestly, most of her country records just sound like soft rock to me anyway, other than maybe "The River's Too Wide" and a couple other songs, she was just making pop music with occasional pedal steel. 

Olivia Newton-John's early albums have kind of a muddled, confusing release history. Her debut If Not For You came out in America, but isn't on streaming services today. Her 2nd album, Olivia, wasn't released in America at the time, but is streaming now. Her 3rd album was called Music Makes My Day in the UK, but in America it was called Let Me Be There, re-used the Olivia cover photo and has a completely different running order combining songs from all three albums (even more confusingly, in Australia the album had the title of the UK version and the running order of the U.S.) version. Then, If You Love Me, Let Me Know was a U.S.-only release cobbled together with songs from earlier albums. I guess that weird approach worked out, though, because Let Me Be There was her first Gold album and got her first Grammy, and If You Love Me, Let Me Know spawned her first #1 single. 
 
Olivia Newton-John's career was pretty up-and-down for a while, she'd make a big hit and then bump around the lower reaches of the charts until finding the next big one. In fact, a year before Grease, she sued to try to get out of her MCA contract, accusing the label of underpromoting her, which resulted in them retaliating and promoting Making A Good Thing Even Better even less. MCA didn't release the Grease soundtrack, but they got several platinum or multi-platinum albums out of her in the years following its success. 5 years after Grease, Olivia Newton-John and John Travolta reunited for Two Of A Kind, a "romantic fantasy crime comedy" that, as you can imagine, was not a huge box office success. But the soundtrack album, which they both sang on, went platinum. And though it's not on streaming services today, Newton-John's songs from the movie are on the recent 40th anniversary reissue of Physical. 

Over the first 15 years of her career, Olivia Newton-John only wrote or co-wrote 7 songs on her albums, and none of them were released as singles, so they're all included here: "Changes," "Rosewater," "Love You Hold The Key," "Don't Ask A Friend," "Talk To Me," "Borrowed Time," and "The Promise (The Dolphin Song)." The 1977 compilation Olivia Newton-John's Greatest Hits, which went double platinum, did include "Changes" to showcase her writing, though. "Talk To Me" has this really cool ominous intro, and then after 20 seconds it kind of changes tone and becomes a sweet, friendly song. 

Newton-John's albums were full of covers, mixed with originals written by Nashville pros or her longtime producer, John Farrar, a fellow Australian. I think the weakest parts of her albums are when she attempts to sing songs made famous by Dolly Parton or Willie Nelson and really doesn't sound like a natural country singer, but she really has a gorgeous voice with the right material. I included her cover of "Why Don't You Write Me" since I also recently put it on my Simon & Garfunkel deep cuts playlist. "Carried Away" was written by Barry Gibb, who also penned Newton-John's hits "I Can't Help It" and "Come On Over." 

Farrar wrote the biggest song of her country era, "Have You Never Been Mellow," and he also wrote two of the new songs for Grease that hadn't been in the original stage musical -- both of them,"You're The One That I Want" and "Hopelessly Devoted To You," were massive hits. And he wrote my favorite song on this playlist, the twangy yet funky "It'll Be Me." One of his songs for Xanadu, "Suspended In Time," was the only deep cut featured on the 2018 tribute album Juliana Hatfield Sings Olivia Newton-John. 

10:09 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 269: Katy Perry

Wednesday, August 17, 2022










Last week I did an Adele deep cuts playlist, and also did Drake and Nicki Minaj playlists recently, and I kind of wanted to continue in that vein of covering some of the biggest pop stars of the past 10-15 years that hadn't been in this series yet. 

Katy Perry deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Self Inflicted
2. Mannequin
3. One Of The Boys
4. If You Can Afford Me
5. Hackensack (live)
6. Brick By Brick (live)
7. Hummingbird Heartbeat
8. Circle The Drain
9. Not Like The Movies
10. Peacock
11. Dressin' Up
12. Walking On Air
13. This Moment
14. Love Me
15. Spiritual
16. Pendulum
17. Deja Vu
18. Witness
19. Act My Age
20. Tucked
21. Champagne Problems

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from One Of The Boys (2008)
Tracks 5 and 6 from the MTV Unplugged EP (2009)
Tracks 7, 8, 9 and 10 from Teenage Dream (2010)
Track 11 from Teenage Dream: The Complete Confection (2012)
Tracks 12, 13 and 14 from Prism (2013)
Track 15 from Prism (Deluxe) (2013)
Tracks 16, 17 and 18 from Witness (2017)
Track 19 from Witness (Deluxe) (2017)
Tracks 20 and 21 from Smile (2020)

Katheryn Elizabeth Hudson had an odd little path to historic pop stardom. As a teenager, she released a Christian rock album as Katy Hudson, but the label that released it soon went bankrupt, and the album never made it streaming services. Around the same time, Almost Famous turned actress Kate Hudson into a household name, so Katy Hudson became Katy Perry by the time she resurfaced as a secular singer. She kicked around the industry for a few years, recording with a lot of big name artists and producers (the first time I ever heard and saw her was in a P.O.D. video, which is bizarre in retrospect). 

The first Katy Perry song that got a major label push was an edgelord piece of garbage called "Ur So Gay," which only made a tiny fraction of the impact that the (slightly) less embarrassing "I Kissed A Girl" made a year later. But "Ur So Gay" appeared on her triple platinum debut One Of The Boys, which is a pretty ugly footnote on an otherwise pretty enjoyable pop/rock album, which includes the title track written by the great Butch Walker. A year after Katy Perry's first album, she recorded an "MTV Unplugged" special that included a pretty good new song, "Brick By Brick," and a cover of one of the most beloved Fountains Of Wayne deep cuts, "Hackensack." But Perry's run on the Warped Tour and her Unplugged EP turned out not to be much of a bellwether for her next project, which would put her in the pop stratosphere alongside singers like Lady Gaga and Britney Spears. 

Teenage Dream was such a massive phenomenon, five #1 singles plus another on the expanded re-release a couple years later, that it's weird to hear the other songs on the album that weren't hits, although there are some good ones. A lot of Katy Perry's music is right in the aesthetic sweet spot of a lot of other guitar-driven pop songs that Max Martin and/or Dr. Luke produced, but she's not half the singer that Kelly Clarkson or Pink is, and her persona and her lyrics can also be a lot more grating than theirs. So her massive success feels a little cynical to me, but I will say, she had some pretty good songs on those first couple albums, and they weren't all singles. 

By the way, speaking of the now disgraced Dr. Luke, it was actually surprisingly easy to make this playlist without any songs he co-wrote or co-produced. He mainly worked on the singles on Katy Perry's first three albums, and she never worked with him again after Kesha's rape accusation. And the few deep cuts he did for Perry were usually pretty mediocre songs like "International Smile" and "Legendary Lovers." So if that's a concern for you, I just wanted to point out you can listen to this playlist without hearing any of Dr. Luke's work. 

An album as big as Teenage Dream could theoretically launch a singer to permanent A-list status, or at least a decade at the top, but Katy Perry started squandering that momentum pretty quickly. "Walking On Air" was a promotional single before the release of Prism, and Katy Perry performed it on "Saturday Night Live," but it never got a proper radio push. And it probably should've, since the official follow-up to "Roar" was "Unconditionally," probably the biggest flop of her career considering that it missed the top 10 after so many #1s. "Spiritual" is notable as Perry's only song co-written by John Mayer during their 2-year relationship, although they sang a duet on one of his albums around the same time.

Witness was a total fiasco without even a couple big memorable hits like Prism, at least as a singles campaign, although I really like "Pendulum." But it didn't even go gold, two albums after a blockbuster that will probably be diamond soon. Her last album Smile was better, but by that point the damage had been done. And now she's been put out to pasture as a judge on "American Idol," just like Paula Abdul, the singer whose brief but impressive Hot 100 success Perry's career most resembles. 

10:18 AM

Tuesday, August 16, 2022







Spin has published its list of the 50 best albums of 1982, and I wrote blurbs about 1999, Thriller, Avalon, and Computer Games. I also posted my own top 50 of '82 here last month. 

10:17 AM

Monday, August 15, 2022





Last week, The Baltimore Banner published my big Baltimore rap retrospective piece. And over the weekend, Jason from the internet radio station Power 104.7 interviewed me about the piece, and we had a great conversation about all the artists I wrote about and the history of the city's hip hop scene. You can hear the interview in the latest episode of Jason's Culture Check podcast, it's available on Spotify, Apple Music, and Mix Cloud (I recommend Mix Cloud because that's a longer version of the episode where he plays songs that were in my article).

10:16 AM

Saturday, August 13, 2022





I reviewed Day Shift, the Jamie Foxx vampire hunter movie out on Netflix this weekend, for Consequence. 

2:14 PM

Monthly Report: August 2022 Singles

Friday, August 12, 2022






1. Halsey - "So Good"
If I Can't Have Love, I Want Power was my #1 album of 2021, and while the commercial risk of the project was to some extent the point, I was disappointed with just how little Halsey's fanbase seems to have taken to the album -- it's already disappeared from her top 10 tracks and 'popular releases' tab on Spotify. And even when she followed it up with a much more radio-friendly Max Martin-produced single, "So Good" infamously got a kind of weird launch when Halsey posted a TikTok complaining that Capitol Records wouldn't release the song until the song went viral on TikTok (naturally, this controversy did go viral and probably helped get the song released, but it's all a sign of a pretty worrying trend with major labels putting the TikTok cart before the horse). I really like "So Good," though, I think it's a much better song than earlier pop hits like "Without Me" or "Now Or Never," and it seems to be slowly building steam at pop radio and getting a chance after a slow start on the charts. And I love the way the bridge transitions perfectly into the climactic final chorus with a bigger drum sound. Here's my 2022 singles Spotify playlist I update every month. 

2. Ava Max - "Maybe You're The Problem"
Two of the biggest hits of the last few years, "Blinding Lights" and "As It Was," both have little 2-finger synthesizer leads that remind me of A-ha's "Take On Me." And "Maybe You're The Problem" definitely hasn't reached the heights of the Weeknd and Harry Styles songs, but it feels like the third "Take On Me"-core contemporary hit to make it really feel like a trend. I love those kinds of synth lines so I'm not complaining. 

3. Pheelz & Buju - "Finesse"
American R&B radio has always been so resistant to sounds and artists from other continents so the number of Nigerian songs blowing up these days is exciting and a little unprecedented. And "Finesse" is one of this summer's Afrobeats hits that really stands out to me, "if I'm broke, that's my business" is such a hilariously great premise for a song.

4. Zach Bryan - "Something In The Orange"
In May, Zach Bryan released American Heartbreak, a sprawling 34-song major label debut that hit #5 on the Billboard 200 without any radio airplay (although a 2019 single by Bryan did get a little Adult Album Alternative chart action). It doesn't sound anything like current mainstream country, and in fact one track on the album, "If She Wants A Cowboy," kind of smugly lampoons the idea of Bryan writing a song to cater to country radio. But his success has led the Nashville establishment to give him a try, and his restrained acoustic Hot 100 hit "Something In The Orange" has been kicking around the lower reaches of the Country Airplay chart for the last 5 weeks. I don't think it'll climb very far up, but it being on there at all is pretty remarkable. 

5. Jimmy Eat World - "Something Loud"
Jimmy Eat World are one of the dozens of bands booked to play the When We Were Young festival in Las Vegas this October. And the outpouring of affection and nostalgia for all the old emo and pop punk bands on the bill when it was announced in January wound up inspiring Jim Adkins to write Jimmy Eat World's latest single, one of the catchiest and most anthemic things they've done in a long time that reflects on the excitement around the festival in a poignant way. 

6. My Chemical Romance - "The Foundations Of Decay"
My Chemical Romance are at the top of the When We Were Young bill, and this year they've been on their first tour in a decade. And I hoped their reunion would involve new music, since I thought they went out with a great album with Danger Days, and the solo releases that Gerard Way and other members of the band did while they were broken up was pretty great. But it wasn't really clear there'd be any new songs until they released "The Foundations Of Decay," and it felt like they decided to confound all expectations and release this slow 6-minute song that doesn't much resemble any of their hits (except maybe a longer, proggier version of "The Ghost Of You"). It took a while to grow on me but I'm glad they put it out, feels like a continuation of MCR's legacy as a band that follows its own muse. 

7. The Beaches - "Grow Up Tomorrow"
A few weeks ago we went on a road trip to Milwaukee to spend a week with my brother and mother who live out there. And while we were there my brother took me to the big annual music festival they have out there, Summerfest. We mostly wandered around eating and catching bits of different acts while waiting for The New Pornographers to play, but the best band I was introduced to that day was a different Canadian band, the Toronto quartet The Beaches. The members of the band each wore a different bright color, very Power Rangers/Powerpuff Girls, but I was really impressed by their songs and their musicianship. So I've been enjoying their previously released music, and then they released this excellent new single a few weeks after the show I saw. 

8. GloRilla - "Tomorrow"
One of my favorite episodes of television ever is the 2005 episode of the Cartoon Network series "Foster's Home For Imaginary Friends" that introduced a hilarious character named Cheese, my wife and I have been quoting that episode two each other for 17 years. So I was very amused that GloRilla's first song since signing to Yo Gotti's CMG label, for their Gangsta Art compilation, opens with a producer using clips of the Cheese episode of "Foster's" as a producer tag (the producer's name, hilariously, is Macaroni Toni, and he's been using the tag on other GloRilla songs for at least a couple years). And "Tomorrow" is another dope song from GloRilla, really cool to see her building more momentum since "F.N.F." blew up. 

9. Doja Cat - "Vegas"
One of the things that Baz Luhrmann's Elvis did a pretty good job with was acknowledging the black musicians who influenced Elvis Presley, including the first artist who recorded "Hound Dog," Big Mama Thornton, who was portrayed in the movie by Shonka Dukureh. And the lead single from the soundtrack, Doja Cat's "Vegas," riffed on "Hound Dog" with a sample of Dukureh's performance in the movie. Sadly, Shonka Dukureh died last month, weeks after making her feature film debut and appearing on a Top 40 hit by one of pop's current biggest stars, very sad that she passed just as her career was really taking off. I like thing song a lot more than most of the Planet Her singles, too, that part where she says "DOG" in one line and "FRAUD" in the next line always makes me think that she's gonna say "FROG." 

10. Latto f/ Lil Wayne and Childish Gambino - "Sunshine" 
"Big Energy" is terrible, but it's one of those huge career-making hits that ends up being hard to follow up. And the second single from Latto's 777, "Sunshine" has already kind of lost momentum and she's released a non-album single, "Pussy." But I think "Sunshine" is a really catchy track with a great Lil Wayne verse. That said, the Childish Gambino feature is weird and surprising, since Donald Glover has done so little music in the two years since he released the 'last' Childish Gambino album and said he was retiring the name -- it kind of feels like just wanted to do a "my sons are mulatto" punchline on a Latto track. And Gambino has always kind of felt like a bad Lil Wayne knockoff as a rapper to me, so it's very on-the-nose to finally hear them on a song together for the first time using the same flow. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Muse - "Compliance" 
I thought Muse had a few pretty enjoyable singles earlier in their career. But it kind of feels like they've gone this rabbit hole of doing the same kind of dystopian vaguely political anthems over and over with diminishing returns. And now it just feels they're starting to sound like Kilroy Was Here era Styx, it's just awful. A shame, because the Craig Zobel film Compliance is one of my favorite movies of the 2010s. 

10:28 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 268: Ginuwine

Thursday, August 11, 2022


 

























It's been a while since Ginuwine put out anything, it seems like these days he mostly performs his old hits and pops up on reality shows or does weird stuff like endorsing a vodka-infused 'adult chocolate milk.' But he's got a pretty nice catalog, wanted to take a look back at his albums. 

Ginuwine deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Hello
2. G. Thang (featuring Missy Elliott and Magoo)
3. World Is So Cold
4. 550 What? (featuring Timbaland)
5. Wait A Minute
6. Toe 2 Toe
7. Final Warning (featuring Aaliyah)
8. Do You Remember
9. No. 1 Fan
10. That's How I Get Down (featuring Ludacris)
11. 2 Way
12. Big Plans (featuring Method Man)
13. Bedda Man
14. The Club (featuring Jadakiss)
15. Since I Found You (with Tommy Redding)
16. First Time
17. Without You
18. Weekend Love (with TGT)

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Ginuwine...The Bachelor (1996)
Tracks 5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 from 100% Ginuwine (1999)
Tracks 10 and 11 from The Life (2001)
Tracks 12 and 13 from The Senior (2003)
Track 14 from Back II Da Basics (2005)
Track 15 from I Apologize (2007)
Track 16 from Elgin (2011)
Track 17 from A Ginuwine Christmas (2011)
Track 18 from TGT's Three Kings (2013)

Ginuwine's debut came out a couple months after Aaliyah's One In A Million, and those albums really kicked off the whole Timbaland era. Obviously, "Pony" is Ginuwine's signature song and also a pretty important Timbaland track. And the Ginuwine...The Bachelor deep cuts "World So Cold" and "Ginuwine 4 Ur Mind" are notable as I think the only other times Timbo but that distinctive vocoder sound from "Pony" on different songs with different melodies. "G. Thang" features samples of D'Angelo's "Brown Sugar" and Portishead's "Numb." Brown Sugar, Dummy, and Ginuwine...The Bachelor are all game changer albums of the mid-'90s, so it's cool that one of them sampled the other two in the same track. I also really dig the album's hidden track, "550 What," which pays tribute to Ginuwine's hometown, Washington, D.C., and ends with a Go-Go groove and shoutouts to a lot of the great Go-Go bands. 

I think 100% Ginuwine is his masterpiece, though, it's just packed with hits and great deep cuts. I think it's up there with One In A Million and Aaliyah, Missy's first 3 albums, and Timbaland & Magoo's Welcome To Our World as the best Swing Mob/Supa Friends albums. I especially love the beat switch on "Do You Remember" where the sample from Queen's "Flash" comes in after that ridiculous mid-song skit. 

The Senior's Method Man collaboration "Big Plans" caught my attention because Ginuwine sings the whole song in AutoTune on its infamous 'zero setting.' Cher's "Believe" had obviously already been out for a few years in 2003, but it still surprised me to hear Ginuwine doing this 2 years before T-Pain's debut album changed everything and made flashy AutoTune the sound of mainstream R&B. 

Ginuwine worked much more sporadically with Timbaland after his first two albums, and while he proved he could make hits with other producers like "Differences" and "In Those Jeans," it definitely feels like a missed opportunity that he didn't work with Timbo steadily through their prime years. The Life only had one Timbaland track, "That's How I Get Down," which also had the album's only big name guest appearance, Ludacris. So it's kind of shocking that that song was never released as a single, it doesn't sound like a smash but it's pretty good. The Life also has "2 Way," an ode to then-trendy Motorola 2-way pagers co-written and co-produced with the great Raphael Saadiq. 

Ginuwine said he'd team with Timbaland on Back II Da Basics but the album wound up with no Timbo productions. By the time they Ginuwine, Timbaland and Missy reunited for the 2009 single "Get Involved," though, the magic was kind of gone. That album, A Man's Thoughts, was Ginuwine's only album for Warner Bros., and it's missing from streaming services now. 

Ginuwine's career tapered off after the mid-2000s. In 2007, Koch Records released I Apologize, sort of compilation of collaborations with unknown independent artists, but the title and cover art kind of misleadingly make it look like a Ginuwine solo album. And then in 2011 he released two independent albums, including a Christmas album with really bad production, and that was the last time he released a solo project. "First Time" from Elgin is one of Ginuwine's only self-produced songs, and the beat is pretty good, definitely feels like he picked something up from working with great producers for so many years. 

In 2013, Tank, Ginuwine and Tyrese released an album as TGT, an R&B supergroup pretty shamelessly patterned after LSG. The album was Ginuwine's biggest commercial success in a decade, but the group never followed it up and he hasn't released much of anything else since then. I guess he mostly just performs the hits these days. I'd love to see him in a Verzuz, though, maybe against Joe or Sisqo, or all three members of TGT in a 3-man Verzuz. That might be the only way Ginuwine really gets back in the spotlight these days, but the old stuff really holds up for me. 

10:27 AM

Movie Diary

Wednesday, August 10, 2022









a) The Gray Man
The Russo brothers have a pretty good track record for directing entertaining stuff, from Marvel movies to some of the best episodes of "Community." But their latest big Netflix movie was kinda boring for me. I feel like a broken record complaining about Ryan Gosling being a boring movie star, and I should be fair to him, because he was good in The Nice Guys and even La La Land, but he was a drag in The Gray Man, Chris Evans being a moderately fun villain couldn't save it. 

I think it's a shame the studio lost its nerve about releasing the movie under its original announced titled The Lost City of D, but otherwise I thought it was great. Sandra Bullock and Channing Tatum are both so good at physical comedy and get so many great character-building moments that make the fun premise come alive and not feel too cheesy or contrived. And Daniel Radcliffe, as always enjoying himself playing against type and keeping his career interesting, is a great villain. 

I always thought it was kind of embarrassing or annoying that the Spider-Man franchise got rebooted so many times partly over intellectual property technicalities and we wound up with 3 actors in the title role in the space of like a decade. But I have to hand it to Marvel for turning lemons into lemonade and getting all of them back together in a multiverse storyline. I hated that all the leaks and social media spoilers took away the element of surprise, but I still found it a lot of fun to watch. 

I hold Sam Raimi in pretty high esteem and think his Spider-Man movies are still a high watermark for superhero movies, so I was really looking forward to this one, and it delivered. Nice mix of horror and comedy (the Pizza Poppa scene is already one of my favorite Bruce Campbell moments ever) and trippy creative mindfucks. It still felt a little less than the sum of its parts in that MCU way where so much exposition and fan service and brand-building and dot-connecting can get in the way of just making it a fully satisfying film in and of itself, but overall I really liked it, my favorite MCU movies since Ant-Man and the Wasp, maybe even Black Panther. 

I don't 'hatewach' much but sometimes I just want to put on a movie while I'm writing that I can afford to ignore if I want to, and so I put this one despite pretty well knowing I probably wasn't going to think highly of it. I mean I think pretty highly of Adam Driver but he couldn't do much to make it worthwhile. That one sex scene was so Showgirls that I almost wonder if they leaned in to making it campier after they realized it was going to be a bad film. And while Al Pacino has been in even worse films, I still felt kind of bad for him for having to do scenes opposite Jared Leto's ridiculous mama mia Italian accent. 

The latest Father of the Bride remake is not as funny as the Steve Martin one I grew up on, which was 2nd tier Steve Martin anyway -- I don't know if Andy Garcia really has the gift for comedy to carry a movie like this. But it was light and enjoyable enough. It's annoying to see someone as funny as Ana Fabrega from "Los Espookys" underused in a small supporting role. 

Woody Harrelson and Kevin Hart both seem to make an action comedy every year, so it feels sort of inevitable that they'd co-headline one eventually. I'm a fan of the 'regular person stumbles into a crazy spy movie plot' trope, but the presence of Kaley Cuoco reminds me that it's been done much better before, including recently in "The Flight Attendant." 

I put on this movie just assuming it was some kind of coming of age drama, some high school kids going about their daily lives. And then, 5 minutes into the movie, you hear a loud sound, and it's gunshots, and the characters you just met survive a school shooting. It was so jarring and unexpected for me that it kind of helped me relate to everything that came after and care about the characters more, whereas if I knew it was a movie somewhat about a school shooting, I might not have watched it. I realize that by writing this I may prevent someone else from having the same experience with the movie, but again it happens in the first 10 minutes so I'm not too worried about 'spoiling' that. 

i) Hypnotic 
A psychological thriller about hypnosis that had a lot of potential in the premise but really just fell flat, disappointing. 

A great cast, hoped it would be a fun and stylish action movie with an all-female cast like Ocean's 8 with spies or something but it was just kind of underwhelming. 

k) The Last Thing He Wanted 
I wish more of this movie was Anne Hathway and Willem Dafoe as daughter and father, I thought that made a more interesting story than where things went once Ben Affleck showed up. 

10:26 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 267: Adele

Tuesday, August 09, 2022






Four albums is kind of the threshold where I think an artist has enough of a catalog to do one of these little 80-minute playlists, so I'd been thinking that after Adele finally released 30 I'd do one for her. But I also wanted to see what songs from that album were released as singles before I presumed them 'deep cuts.' Each of her previous albums had 4 or 5 singles, which isn't really a lot for the biggest selling artist of the last 15 years, they never did the Janet Jackson 7-single campaign thing. But oddly it feels like they just stopped at two singles for 30, it's been 7 months since the "Oh My God" video was released. Still, I avoided some of the more likely future 30 singles on this playlist just to be safe. 

Adele deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Don't You Remember
2. Sweetest Devotion
3. Melt My Heart To Stone
4. To Be Loved
5. River Lea
6. He Won't Go
7. Right As Rain
8. Cry Your Heart Out
9. One And Only
10. Daydreamer
11. All Night Parking (Interlude) with Erroll Garner
12. Remedy
13. I'll Be Waiting
14. All I Ask
15. Woman Like Me
16. Crazy For You
17. I Miss You
18. Take It All

Tracks 3, 7, 10 and 16 from 19 (2008)
Tracks 1, 6, 9, 13 and 18 from 21 (2011)
Tracks 2, 5, 12, 14 and 17 from 25 (2015)
Tracks 4, 8, 11 and 15 from 30 (2021)

I think "Sweetest Devotion" is Adele's deep cut, it's a perfect closer for 25 but I wanted to put it right near the front here. It's interesting that some her biggest collaborators worked on songs that weren't singles. For instance, Bruno Mars co-wrote "All I Ask," and Rick Rubin produced "He Won't Go," "Don't You Remember," and "One And Only." The latter two of those were co-written by Dan Wilson of Semisonic, who I've always held in pretty high regard as a songwriter and it's been cool see him experience this career revival writing "Someone Like You" and other hits for big name pop artists. 

Obviously Adele's voice is the star attraction of these records and it feels like everything is set up pretty well to frame that, although sometimes you get memorable instrumental performances like drummer Chris Dave on "One And Only" and "Cry Your Heart Out." "To Be Loved" from the latest album stands out to be as one of her most impressive vocals. And I love the end of "Woman Like Me" where she gives the band a quick 'one more time' cue before the last refrain, there's some very old-fashioned musicians-in-a-room atmosphere on the best of these songs. And I like hearing her uses her voice a little differently on some of these songs, like the kind of squeaky emphatic high notes on "Melt My Heart To Stone." That's one of the 3 songs she wrote with "Chasing Pavements" co-writer Eg White, who's a big hitmaker in the UK but hasn't written much that's well known in America outside of Adele. 

10:25 AM

Monday, August 08, 2022








I wrote a piece for The Baltimore Banner that's kind of an overview of Baltimore rap since 2000, with a great song representing every year of the 21st century. 

9:00 AM

Monthly Report: July 2022 Albums

Friday, August 05, 2022







1. Beyonce - Renaissance
If I was going to compare Renaissance to any other Beyonce albums, I'd say it's like attitude of B'Day fed through the aesthetics of the self-titled album. And those are my top two records by her, so that vibe works for me. The murmurs that this is the first of a trio of albums makes me wonder what the other two are going to sound like, but in any event I'm glad she led with a more danceable record. I don't love the first 3 songs, but it gets going from there, so far the standouts for me are "Cuff It" and "Church Girl" and "Plastic Off The Sofa" and "Virgo's Groove" and "Thique" and "All Up In Your Mind." Here's the 2022 albums Spotify playlist I add all these records to as I check them out. 

2. Maggie Rogers - Surrender
One thing I like about Maggie Rogers is that her first viral hit "Alaska" established her whole unique aesthetic, sort of an acoustic indie folk thing filtered through hi-tech pop/hip hop production, and she's managed to stay true to that in different forms through her two major label albums and a number of different co-producers. Surrender was primarily co-written and co-produced by Kid Harpoon, who is Harry Styles's primary collaborator, but it mostly just sounds like a Maggie Rogers record, albeit one that feels a little bigger and more bombastic than Heard It In A Past Life. She's also really developing as a singer and pushed her voice into a different space on "Shatter" and gives this Patti Smith-like performance that's really impressive. 

3. King Princess - Hold On Baby
Maggie Rogers and King Princess released two of my favorite debut albums of 2019, so it was kind of cool to get 2nd albums from both on the same day last week. "Crowbar" is by far my favorite track so far, but it was also a really cool surprise to hear Taylor Hawkins on drums on the great closing track "Let Us Die."

4. Beabadoobee - Beatopia
I loved Beabadoobee's 2020 debut full-length Fake It Flowers without really delving much into her earlier, more lo-fi and downtempo EPs. But it appears that her fans prefer the EPs, because over the past two years a lot of her most streamed songs have been non-album tracks. Her second album Beatopia perhaps wisely feels like a combination of the slick, crunchy '90s alt rock of Fake It Flowers and the more homespun EP material. 

5. Flo Milli - You Still Here, Ho? 
I'm forever amused by major label rap's semantic struggles to arbitrarily some projects as albums and some as mixtapes. You Still Here, Ho? is Flo Milli's "debut album," but it's pretty much of the same quality as 2020's Ho, Why Is You Here? which was 10 minutes shorter and is now retconned as a "mixtape." Regardless, Flo Milli is 2 for 2 on these projects, "Bed Time" and "Do It Better" are my favorites so far. 

6. India Shawn - Before We Go (Deeper)
I didn't hear India Shawn's Before We Go EP last year, but she expanded it into a full-length album and I'm really enjoying it, her voice is so velvety and soothing on "Exchange" and "Caught In The Middle." D'Mile is really on an incredible hot streak of producing projects by Lucky Daye, Joyce Wrice, Silk Sonic, Victoria Monet, and now this, he doesn't have any one signature sound but really knows how to make lush R&B music that fuses old and new sounds. 

7. Jack White - Entering Heaven Alive
Back in April I was asked to review Jack White's first album of 2022, Fear of the Dawn, for Consequence, and a couple weeks ago that led to a pretty cool opportunity to talk about White's other new album, Entering Heaven Alive, on All Things Considered. I definitely prefer White's louder material and think Fear of the Dawn is some of his best stuff ever, but I enjoyed Entering Heaven Alive more than I expected to, there's an interesting range of sounds on here. I think my favorite track that wasn't featured in the NPR segment is "A Tree On Fire From Within," which has a really great piano sound and bass guitar sort of operating as a lead instrument. 

8. Brent Faiyaz - Wasteland
Like many people, I've loved Brent Faiyaz's voice since the first time I heard GoldLink's "Crew." And while I had a hunch that Faiyaz would launch a successful career after that song, I'm surprised it took 5 years. But I'm also impressed that he remained independent while getting to #2 on the Billboard 200, that's a real accomplishment. I like Faiyaz's voice more than his songwriting, and his Weeknd-style cinematically tortured toxic debauched lyrics make me roll my eyes sometimes (like, the song title "Ghetto Gatsby," gimme a break). And there are literally 11 minutes of skits on this album that have zero replay value. But the production and the singing on Wasteland are top shelf and the big name guests kind of feel like they're on his turf and are integrated organically, and I like the stretch towards the end with "Role Model," "Jackie Brown" and "Bad Luck."

9. DJ Premier - Hip Hop 50: Vol. 1 EP
I posted my top 100 rap singles of the '90s this week, and in that piece I said "DJ Premier is still probably my top hip hop producer of all time." So I was pretty excited that Premier has started rolling out a series of all-star EPs to celebrate the approaching 50th anniversary of Kool Herc's first Bronx block party in 1973. Even if Premo's beats don't snap quite the same as they used to, I love hearing him do his thing and there are some inspired artist combos on here, including Slick Rick/Lil Wayne and Remy Ra/Rapsody. 

10. James Bay - Leap
In 2014, James Bay debuted as a long-haired acoustic singer-songwriter with a big goofy hat, and became a huge star in the UK and had some moderate success in America with one pop hit and three Grammy nominations. In 2018, he cut his hair, took off the hat, and completely overhauled his sound with more sleek, modern Electric Light. And it was a total flop, but I loved it, one of my favorite albums of the 2010s, I think it's great in similar ways to the last couple Harry Styles albums. And Leap feels like Bay's label told him to grow his hair back out and put on the hat and write some ballads, which is doubly disheartening because it doesn't seem to have resulted in a significant commercial comeback. But I still really like his voice and his writing, and there's some livelier songs on here like "Love Don't Hate Me" that feel like he didn't completely abandon the experiments of Electric Light. 

The Worst Album of the Month: Journey - Freedom
I will say, Journey's classic rock staples have aged really well (and not just "Don't Stop Believin'," there are a half dozen that I think are just as good). And the band finding a talented new frontman who can pull off the Steve Perry era songs, Filipino singer Arnel Pineda, is a great story. But it still surprises me a little bit just how successful Journey's current lineup is -- they headlined Lollapalooza last year and still play arenas, and their first album with Pineda went platinum. It makes sense to me that Queen and Dead & Company can still sell a lot of tickets basically paying tribute to their frontmen who have passed away, but Steve Perry is still alive and, judging from his last record, can still sing pretty well, which maybe shouldn't matter but to me it does. Neal Schon and Jonathan Cain co-wrote most of the band's hits, so I can understand them wanting to make new records, especially now that one of the biggest pop hitmakers of the 1980s, Narada Michael Walden, is playing drums for Journey and writing songs with them. But Freedom really doesn't have any of the old magic, it sounds like any other washed up old band trying to recapture past glories, and when Pineda isn't singing the hits he doesn't really remind me of Perry much (aside from maybe "After Glow" or "Don't Go"). The single "Don't Give Up On Us" sounding like a knockoff of "Separate Ways" just increases the whole weird uncanny valley vibe of the whole enterprise. 

9:43 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 266: Simon & Garfunkel

Thursday, August 04, 2022






My last deep cuts playlist was The Bangles, who recorded a hit cover of "Hazy Shade of Winter," and more or less coincidentally I'm following it up with the duo who made the original. 

Simon & Garfunkel deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Kathy's Song
2. Bookends Theme
3. Flowers Never Bend With The Rainfall
4. The Only Living Boy In New York
5. He Was My Brother
6. April Come She Will (live)
7. Save The Life Of My Child
8. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)
9. Baby Driver
10. Overs
11. Sparrow
12. Leaves That Are Green
13. Cloudy
14. Song For The Asking
15. Punky's Dilemma
16. The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine
17. Somewhere They Can't Find Me
18. Bleecker Street
19. Keep The Customer Satisfied
20. Richard Corry
21. Patterns
22. Benedictus
23. So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright
24. Blessed
25. A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd Into Submission)
26. Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M.
27. A Most Peculiar Man
28. Why Don't You Write Me
29. Bookends Theme (Reprise)
30. Old Friends (live)
31. The Sun Is Burning 

Tracks 5, 11, 18, 22, 26 and 31 from Wednesday Morning, 3 A.M. (1964)
Tracks 1, 12, 17, 20, 24 and 27 from Sounds of Silence (1966)
Tracks 3, 8, 13, 16, 21 and 25 from Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme (1966)
Tracks 2, 7, 10, 15 and 29 from Bookends (1968)
Tracks 4, 9, 14, 19, 23 and 28 from Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970)
Tracks 6 and 30 from The Concert In Central Park (1982)

A few years ago I made a Paul Simon deep cuts playlist and noted that I briefly considered trying to cram his solo career and Simon & Garfunkel into one playlist, but decided to give each catalog its own space. Of course, the duo's discography is a bit smaller -- they only made five LPs, three of them under a half hour long, that contained quite a lot of hit singles. So it was pretty easy to winnow it down to an 80-minute playlist of, essentially, the less popular half of their catalog, which made me put more emphasis on getting the sequencing right. Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was one of my parents' LPs that I played regularly when I got my first turntable, and the 1999 compilation The Definitive Simon & Garfunkel has also gotten a lot of rotation over the years, but some of these albums I needed to check out for the first time and explore a little. 

A lot of these songs are still pretty well known in one form or another. In 1967, "The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)" was a top 20 hit for Harpers Bizarre, a group fronted by future big time producer Ted Templeman (Van Halen, The Doobie Brothers), but the Simon & Garfunkel version never charted, so it seemed like fair game to include here. Gary Puckett charted with a cover of "Keep The Customer Satisfied" in 1971. "The Only Living Boy In New York" was a hit for Everything But The Girl in 1993. "April Come She Will" and "The Big Bright Green Pleasure Machine" were among the Simon & Garfunkel songs that appeared on the soundtrack to The Graduate, and the latter charted after it was released as the B-side of "The Dangling Conversatoin." And of course "Baby Driver" appeared in the 2017 Edgar Wright film named after the song. 

Paul Simon's music absorbed a wide variety of instruments, genres and cultural influences over the course of his solo career, and there are hints of his future adventurousness in the Simon & Garfunkel albums. "Save the Life of My Child" sounds pretty ahead of its time for 1968, and actually features a Moog bassline played by producer John Simon with assistance from the synthesizer's inventor, Robert Moog. Paul and Art reunited on stage and on record many times after Bridge Over Troubled Water, but both times they attempted to make an album together, in 1975 and in 1982, things never came together. Their 1981 free concert in Central Park reputedly drew the largest concert audience ever at the time, and spawned a multi-platinum live album -- they mostly played the hits, although the concert did feature a couple deep cuts, "April Come She Will" from Sounds of Silence and "Old Friends" from Bookends. 

5:02 AM

Wednesday, August 03, 2022





The 2nd season of "Reservation Dogs" begins tonight, and I reviewed the first 4 episodes for Consequence. 

5:01 AM

My Top 100 Rap Singles of the 1990s

Tuesday, August 02, 2022







Over the past year I've posted lists of my favorite R&B, pop, and rock singles of the 1990s. But I found this one particularly exciting and a little daunting to work on, because there may be no genre that exploded more creatively and commercially in a 10-year period as much as hip-hop in the '90s. Even in these 100 songs I think I'm only scratching the surface, but I tried to at least suggest the incredible range that rap had even at the mainstream level in the '90s. Here's the Spotify playlist, which has everything except one of the versions of "Deep Cover," and has unfortunate clean edits of a couple songs:

1. Notorious B.I.G. - "Juicy" (1994)
Now and again, I hear some rising rap star for the first time, and their breakthrough single sounds like a self-congratulatory look back at their long 16 or 22 years of life before they made in the music industry, and here they are, a star. And I shouldn't be annoyed, because these kinds of songs are direct descendants of the first single from the first Biggie Smalls album. But then, nobody ever did it better than Biggie. I've never been big on singing or rapping along with music while I listen to it, and I rarely memorize a verse well enough to rap along with it anyway, but this is definitely one of those few songs I know word for word. 

2. Geto Boys - "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" (1991)
So much of the Geto Boys' music was shock rap that works as pure provocation. "Mind Playing Tricks On Me" still has a horror movie atmosphere to it (including a dream sequence that takes place on Halloween), but it's much more psychological and ruminative. Scarface has an incredible catalog, but producing "Mind Playing Tricks" and writing 3 of its 4 verses is easily his crowning achievement. 

3. A Tribe Called Quest f/ Leaders Of The New School - "Scenario" (1992)
The Low End Theory is my #1 rap album of all time, so I knew this had to be pretty high up on the list. The posse cut has become kind of a leaden ritual of mainstream hip hop, DJ Khaled packing MCs on songs to show off his clout or all-star remixes trying to push a hit single further of a charts. But the oneupsmanship that a good posse cut can bring out of MCs is a powerful force, and nobody's exploited it better than Busta Rhymes, who shined so bright on "Scenario," where every verse is great, that he all but ensured that Leaders Of The New School would break up and that his solo career would far surpass the group's success. 

4. Snoop Doggy Dogg - "Gin And Juice" (1994)
Although I love the rawer sound of '80s hip hop, it's really remarkable how much a handful of great artists spurred each other to refine and heighten rap production in the early '90s. What Ali Shaheed Muhammed and Q-Tip did on The Low End Theory inspired what Dr. Dre did on The Chronic, which in turn inspired Tribe's Midnight Marauders. Snoop's charisma on those Chronic and Doggystyle hits is overwhelming that you almost forget how beautifully constructed those beats are, but for me Snoop and Dre's tag team peaked with "Gin And Juice." I love how those 4 bass notes kick off the track. By the way, people always quote "with my mind on my money and my money on my mind" as a Snoop line, but it's definitely someone else's voice on that part. But who? Sounds like it could be Dre or Daz but I'm not sure. 

5. Warren G and Nate Dogg - "Regulate" (1994)
Death Row's roster of talent was so deep that they didn't even bother to sign Snoop's old Long Beach friends or their group 213, even after Nate Dogg and Warren G made essential contributions to most of the label's classic albums (although the pair of Death Row guys that got branded by the label as Snoop proteges, Daz and Kurupt of the Dogg Pound, became West coast legends too). But Warren and Nate still made themselves into stars off the strength of gangsta rap's smoothest smash, sampling Michael McDonald for a hit off Death Row's soundtrack for Above The Rim. "Regulate" blew up the same summer as "Thuggishh Ruggish Bone," and Nate Dogg and Bone Thugs-n-Harmony are probably equally pivotal figures in turning rap singing or melodic rapping into an artform in its own right. 

6. Wu-Tang Clan - "C.R.E.A.M." (1994)
Before I even heard Wu-Tang's breakthrough single, I heard kids quoting the hook, and in my mind "cash rules everything around me, cream, get the money, dolla dolla bill y'all" sounded like one of those choruses where a DJ scratched together phrases from 3 or 4 different records. It was only later in listened to the song that I realized Method Man was just casually spitting the whole thing. It's crazy to think this was most people's introduction to Wu-Tang, and a great one, but it was still only the tip of the iceberg, a song that only involved 4 of the 9 members of the group.

7. Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth - "They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)" (1992)
Although many of the rap legends who died young have been memorialized in song (most famously, for better or worse, "I'll Be Missing You"), the most profound expression of grief in hip hop might be Pete Rock's dedication to a relatively minor figure, Heavy D & The Boyz dancer Trouble T Roy. Pete Rock says he cried while making the song, and the emotion just pours out of the track, but even on a technical level the drum programming is incredible, the snare hitting all these little unpredictable accents more like a jazz drummer than a drum machine. 

8. Queen Latifah - "U.N.I.T.Y." (1994)
As you can see from the last 3 songs, acronyms were very big in '90s hip hop, although "U.N.I.T.Y." didn't really stand for anything in the song, Latifah was just spelling out the word. There was nearly decade where Salt-N-Pepa reigned as the biggest female rap act, but a lot of great solo MCs thrived in that era too, and "U.N.I.T.Y." and MC Lyte's "Ruffneck" were such badass, tough-sounding songs that really changed my perception of women in hip hop. 

9. 2Pac - "Keep Ya Head Up" (1993)
It's funny that even as the criteria for good rapping continues to expand as hip-hop evolves, people still seem to bend over backwards to insist that Tupac Shakur wasn't a good rapper. But he was one of rap's greatest songwriters, with a great ear for flows, phrasing and rhetoric that more that made up for his shortcomings in rhymes, and "Keep Ya Head Up" is one of the songs I come back to the most

10. DMX - "Ruff Ryders Anthem" (1998)
The Swizz Beatz sound inelegantly stuck out like a sore thumb amidst all the sleeker, more artful rap production of the second half of the '90s. But I think one of the reasons DMX was the guy who stamped Swizz at a hitmaker is he was such a seasoned MC, honing his craft for a decade before he exploded in '98, who could dart around those simple beats with all these jazzy little accents that made a song like "Ruff Ryders Anthem" sound like more than the sum of its harts. 
































11. LL Cool J - "Mama Said Knock You Out" (1991)
The scene in Chris Rock's 2014 movie Top Five where Rock's character names his top five rappers culminates in him sheepishly adding "my 6th man's LL Cool J," and then, shouting over his friends' derision, defensively adding "BEFORE THE SHOW!" (the show being LL's 1995-1999 sitcom "In The House"). But LL Cool J coined the term GOAT and he's still one of rap's GOATs, and "Mama Said Knock You Out" sits nicely as the pinnacle at almost the exact halfway point of his historic run as one of the greats, the top of the pyramid of his career. 

12. Outkast - "ATLiens" (1996)
I can remember reading reviews of ATLiens in a couple magazines before I'd ever heard Outkast and being really intrigued (I also hadn't heard Atlanta referred to as the A-T-L so I had the completely wrong idea of how ATLiens was pronounced). Nowadays I like their early stuff best, and kind of gravitated to this as my dark horse favorite of their '90s singles, I feel like it's onne of their best-sounding beats, notably self-produced by Andrew and Big Boi rather than by Organized Noize.

13. Juvenile - "Ha" (1998)
Even though No Limit had brought the national spotlight to New Orleans and no doubt motivated Universal's $30 million investment in Cash Money Records in 1998, "Ha" sounded like it had been beamed in from another planet when it showed up on MTV. And even after "Back That Azz Up" made good on Universal's bet and 400 Degreez went quadruple platinum and we got a lot more used to Mannie Fresh's beats and Juvenile's voice, "Ha" still sounds bold and bizarre as the launching pad for southern rap's most profitable empire. 

14. Puff Daddy f/ The LOX, Lil Kim and the Notorious B.I.G. - "It's All About The Benjamins (Remix)" (1997)
"Benjamins" would've been the hardest song Bad Boy ever put out even if it remained the original mixtape version with just Puff, Jada and Sheek (which, fascinatingly, was put together by an uncredited Missy Elliott). But the addition of the iconic Lil Kim verse and the incredible beat switch for the Biggie verse really put it into another stratosphere. It's weird to think that I didn't really like this song when it first came out. 

15. Craig Mack - "Flava In Ya Ear" (1994)
It's tempting to opt for the remix of  "Flava In ya Ear," which is the gold standard everyone aims for when making an all-star remix to a hit song. But I think the late Craig Mack deserves some credit for how killer this song is in its original incarnation. In college I had a roommate who loved this song so much that he memorized all the lyrics, and honestly all three of Craig's verses are as great as the verses on the remix.

16. Mobb Deep - "Shook Ones Part II" (1995)
Now I'm sad noticing that I just put three songs in a row with rappers that have passed away. I'm glad I got to interview both members of Mobb Deep while the group was still together, though, and their music has aged incredibly well, especially The Infamous. As someone who's tried recording a lot of household objects and knows that turning them into music very rarely actually works and sounds good, I'm in awe of how Havoc made one of the hardest beats of all time by turning the sound of a stove igniting into a hi-hat. 

17. Souls Of Mischief - "'93 Til Infinity" (1993)
There are a few songs on here that I don't think I actually heard until the '90s were over, and this is definitely one of the highest. Just an incredible beat with so much energy and personality in the verses, makes me feel like the Hieroglyphics crew could've made a lot more mainstream hits beyond this song (although one of the guys shouted out at the end of "'93 Til Infinity," Del The Funky Homosapien, was later on a pretty big Gorillaz song).

18. Method Man f/ Mary J. Blige - "I'll Be There for You/You're All I Need to Get By" (1995)
Hip hop was a close neighbor to R&B from the beginning, and somewhere between Jody Watley and Rakim's 1989 hit "Friend" and Ja Rule's string of hit duets in the early 2000s, a durable formula of guys rapping verses and girls singing hooks emerged as a perennial chart staple. And perhaps the greatest example of the form is, fittingly, the Queen of Hip Hop Soul and one of rap's most enduring heartthrobs putting a twist on a classic Marvin Gaye/Tammi Terrell duet. The "All I Need" without Mary J. Blige on Tical has little to do with the the 2 hit versions -- I hear the Puff Daddy mix on the radio more, but I always preferred the RZA-produced Razor Sharp Mix that appears in the video, so that's what I put on the playlist.

19. Busta Rhymes - "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" (1997)
Busta Rhymes appeared on and made hits throughout nearly the entire decade, but it feels right that he really hit his peak of ubiquity in 1997, when he became the ideal muse for Hype Williams and served as an animated counterpoint to the more laconic figures like Puffy and Ma$e. "Put Your Hands Where My Eyes Could See" probably had some minor imitators but it always feels like it sits apart from the other hits of '97, that Seals and Croft sample sounds so ominous and almost menacing in this context. 

20. Jay-Z f/ Jaz-O and Amil - "Jigga What, Jigga Who (Originator '99)" (1999)
Jay-Z made four of his best albums in the '90s, including his biggest seller, but it feels like his 20th century fame only hinted at the kind of dominant GOAT figure he'd become in the new millennium. Similarly, Timbaland's biggest chart success came in the 2000s, but he really broke the mold and revolutionized R&B and then hip-hop production in the '90s. And when Jay and Timbo started working together, some serious magic started happening. 
































21. N.O.R.E. - "Superthug" (1998)
Much like their hometown Virginia Beach pal Timbaland, Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo of The Neptunes got their foot in the door apprenticing with R&B hitmakers, but their inventive signature sound really blossomed once they started getting in the studio with rappers. It's funny, I experienced a lot of the music on this list primarily when the videos came on MTV or BET or The Box, and sometimes TV speakers really didn't do the music justice. So I liked 'Superthug" at the time, but mainly as this silly song where the whole hook was "what what what what what," and it took me a few years to realize how crazy the beat was. 

22. Luniz - "I Got 5 On It" (1995)
About a decade ago, Spin asked me to put together a list of the biggest Hot 100 hits about or mentioning weed, and "I Got 5 On It" ranked at #9. If Id ordered the list by quality, though, this song would #2 behind "Gin & Juice." 

23. EPMD - "Crossover" (1992)
I think more than most rappers of the late '80s and early '90s, EPMD provided a template for the sound and attitude of popular hip-hop in the decades to come. But in their moment, EPMD were kind of underdogs, scoring a string of gold albums while the few multiplatinum rap albums were by guys more like MC Hammer. So it's a little ironic that EPMD's biggest hit is the one decrying crossover appeal. 

24. Gang Starr - "Mass Appeal" (1994)
Another brilliant song decrying catering to the masses that happened to be catchy enough to become the group's biggest Hot 100 hit. DJ Premier is still probably my top hip hop producer of all time, and one of my favorite moments as an interviewer was talking him on the phone a few years ago and hearing him explain different kinds of DJ scratches and imitate them with his voice. 

25. 3rd Bass - "Pop Goes The Weasel" (1991)
And now 3rd Bass is our third group in a row who scored their biggest hit (in their case their only Hot 100 hit) by denouncing other rappers who went pop. Of course, 3rd Bass had the additional anxiety of being one of the most prominent white groups in the aftermath of the enormous success of the Beastie Boys and Vanilla Ice. Hilariously, 3rd Bass had Henry Rollins play Vanilla Ice in the "Pop Goes The Weasel" video, but even as satire it's a good pop rap song, trading in the Queen and David Bowie sample for an inspired combination of Peter Gabriel and The Who samples. 

26. Naughty By Nature - "O.P.P." (1991)
As much as the early '90s were the disheartening MC Hammer era of pop rap, there were some genuinely great crossover hits in those years. As a prepubescent kid I barely understood "O.P.P." and that made the song seem even dirtier to me than it really was, but man, what an insanely catchy song, Treach had such a star quality that it always surprised me he never had a big solo career. Hilariously, practically the only line in the song that isn't sexual innuendo is the part where Treach tells the guy who programmed the bassline, "Dave, drop a load on 'em." 

27. Digital Underground - "The Humpty Dance" (1990)
As with "O.P.P." I think a lot of the innuendo of "The Humpty Dance" went over my head at the time. It's such a deliriously entertaining song, though, Digital Underground deserved to be known for more than this song, but it seemed like Shock G was cool with Humpty Hump being a big part of his legacy. I kind of associate "The Humpty Dance" with things like "Love Shack" and "Groove Is In The Heart," songs that made popular music seem absurdly campy but irresistibly fun when I first started to really pay attention to what was going on. 

28. Biz Markie - "Just A Friend" (1990)
Biz Markie died last year just a couple months after Shock G, and it felt like a very sad period that also underlined that both of these guys demonstrated how it was possible to be a total fun-loving goofball but also embody hip-hop to the core. 

29. DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince - "Summertime" (1991)
He's The DJ, I'm The Rapper was the first rap album I ever heard when hanging out with one of my older cousins, and it's a pretty perfect kid-friendly record to seduce suburban kids to the charms of hip hop. But by the time Will Smith made his best and most enduring song, he had already made the jump to acting with the first season of "The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air," paving the way to make a bigger impact on the box office than he'd ever made on music. 

30. Positive K - "I Got A Man" (1993)
I thought "I Got A Man" was one of the funniest songs I'd ever heard for about a decade before I even realized that the 'girl' on the song was actually also Positive K with his voice pitch-shifted up. But it still feels like a classic of the 'battle of the sexes' rap subgenre, alongside "Bitties In The BK Lounge," "Nann," and "Chickenhead." 
































31. Sir Mix-A-Lot - "Baby Got Back" (1992)
Another cartoonishly silly crossover hit that I still think took a ton of talent to rap and produce. In another world, Sir Mix-A-Lot probably could've continued on the path of "Posse On Broadway" and become a respected trailblazer for northwest rap who's not associate with a novelty song, but I'm glad we live in a world where I can listen to "Baby Got Back" ever now and again. 

32. Lost Boyz - "Renee" (1996)
I remember when I met one of my favorite Baltimore rappers, Tate Kobang, and I thought it was cool as hell that this talented kid barely out of his teens namechecked Lost Boyz-era Mr. Cheeks as one of his biggest influences. "Lights, Camera, Action" was fun and all, but "Renee," man, that's an incredibly well written song. 

33. Ice Cube - "It Was A Good Day" (1993)
"It Was A Good Day" is pretty atypical for one of the West Coast's greatest MCs. In fact, it kind of sounds like every other song Ice Cube made for the first decade or so of his career was recorded on a bad day. But it's still a great showcase for Cube's skill as a writer, and the way he took the kind of laid back new wave of gangsta rap that his former groupmate Dr. Dre had spearheaded, and turned it into this dryly funny satirical narrative about a day in the life of an L.A. badass.

34. Nas - "It Ain't Hard To Tell" (1994)
Being a kid who didn't really know much about hip-hop beyond what I saw on "Yo! MTV Raps," I never heard of Nas until "If I Ruled The World" and It Was Written. Even the one Hot 100 entry from Illmatic somehow missed me, and I didn't pick up Nas's debut or understand why he was so revered until, I dunno, 2002? But I'm kind of surprised "It Ain't Hard To Tell" wasn't bigger at the time, it's such a perfect closer for the album, I don't know if it helped or hurt Nas that SWV had just done their "Human Nature" sample 2 years earlier.

35. Jeru The Damaja - "Come Clean" (1994)
Wierdly, though I didn't hear a word about Illmatic in '94, I remember MTV showering more attention on Jeru The Damaja's album than Nas or Biggie's legendary debuts at the time. "Come Clean" was probably the first DJ Premier production I ever heard, and it really is a memorably weird track.

36. Missy Elliott - "The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)" (1997)
As much as my memories here are invariably tied up in MTV, "The Rain" is probably one song that everybody thinks of as inextricably linked to its music video. Like Juvenile's "Ha," I think of "The Rain" as a gutsy, atypical song to use to introduce the artist to the national public, but it worked in a similarly enormous way. 

37. LL Cool J f/ LeShaun - "Doin' It" (1995)
In addition to being arguably the #1 MC of hip hop's first two decades, LL Cool J often seems like one of the most dangerously horny men who ever lived, and in that sense "Doin' It" is the most LL song LL ever made. The female MC on the song, LeShaun, absolutely killed the track, which was apparently based on one of her solo songs. Unfortunately, LL and Hype Williams decided to cast other women to lip sync LeShaun's verses in the video because she was pregnant, and her career never really progressed beyond that one hit, and I have to wonder if she could've hung with Kim and Foxy if she got the chance.

38. Big Punisher f/ Joe - "Still Not a Player" (1998)
It always amuses me when two songs get smushed together into something that becomes far bigger than either of the originals (like "Teach Me How To Dougie," which totally eclipsed "Teach Me How To Jerk" and "My Dougie"). It was pretty clever for Big Pun to combine his single "I'm Not A Player" with Joe's single "Don't Wanna Be A Player" into a new song, but those of us who hadn't heard either needed no context to love it. I'm still irritated that "Still Not A Player" appears before "I'm Not A Player on Capital Punishment, though, that's just bad sequencing!

39. Salt-n-Pepa f/ En Vogue - "Whatta Man" (1993)
Salt, Pepa and Spinderella were the top-selling women in hip hop for almost a decade, and their collaboration with the top girl group of the early '90s was really just an inspired pairing, really a great example of how fun and full of personality a pop rap song can be. 

40. Black Sheep - "The Choice Is Yours (Revisited)" (1992)
The aptly named Black Sheep never really built a legacy as significant as the other Native Tongues groups, but this is probably one of the top 3 best Native Tongues singles. I saw Black Sheep play the Ottobar in Baltimore around I think 2002 or 2003, and those guys really know how to put on a show. The place absolutely exploded when they broke out "The Choice Is Yours," might be a top 5 live hip hop moment for me.
































41. UGK f/ Smoke D - "Front, Back & Side To Side" (1994)
UGK were one of the best southern rap groups of the '90s, but they didn't really start to get even half of the mainstream profile they deserved until "Big Pimpin'" and "Sippin' On Some Syrup" hit just after the decade ended. Those first four albums are full of classic songs, though, with "Front, Back & Side To Side" giving them an early taste of national radio airplay in '94, and again in 2006 when they remade the song with T.I.

42. Goodie Mob - "Cell Therapy" (1995)
Outkast's debut single "Player's Ball" hit #37 on the Hot 100, and from there the duo kept climbing until they started making #1s. Their Dungeon Family compatriots in Goodie Mob hit #39 with their debut single, but then they got any higher on the charts after that. And it's a shame that they don't really get their due as more than 'Cee-Lo's old group' for classics like Soul Food. 

43. The Roots f/ Erykah Badu and Eve - "You Got Me" (1999)
Playing drums was a big part of my gateway to loving hip hop, just appreciating the way the mix is centered on the drums and there's such a wide variety of textures and rhythms in the percussion on rap records. But sure, at one point was also a little closed-minded as a white rock musician who lamented that loops and breaks were replacing human drummers. Once I came to respect the art of beatmaking, though, I also gained a richer appreciation for The Roots' singular achievements in the genre and the way Questlove mastered both the drum set and the drum machine. And "You Got Me," with its sneaky transition from a delicate live R&B groove to the skittering drum'n'bass outro, is one of his finest moments. "You Got Me" and Things Fall Apart blew me away when I was 17, and I remember learning about the launch of OkayPlayer.com via the album's liner notes, so writing my first piece for the site earlier this year was a big deal for me.

44. Black Star f/ Common - "Respiration" (1999)
The whole idea of "conscious" rap being this sort of adversarial corrective to mainstream hip-hop really peaked in the late '90s, and that era has aged in weird ways. But Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common all made some great music then, and even though it wasn't really much of a hit, "Respiration" really stands out as a masterpiece, Mos in particular really did something special on that record. 

45. Cypress Hill - "Insane In The Brain" (1993)
"Insane In The Brain" was a hit on the rap charts and not the rock charts, but it feels like that song was the start of this weird drift were Cypress Hill kind of got adopted as an 'alternative' group that got played on MTV's "Alternative Nation" and some rock stations alongside white rap groups like Beastie Boys and House of Pain and co-headlined Lollapalooza. Was it because they were synonymous with smoking weed, or because they were Latino? I dunno. But still, a great song, and I was so disappointed just now to put on the album version of "Insane In The Brain" and not hear the Youngbloods "I think I'm goin' crazy" sample that's at the end of the video mix.

46. Sagat - "Why Is It? (Funk Dat)" (1994)
I've spent a lot of the last 2 decades writing about Baltimore hip hop and watchfully noting the rare occasions when a Baltimore rapper made it to the Billboard charts, from B. Rich to Shodie Shordie. But back in the '90s, the only guy from the city who had a moment like that was Sagat and his odd hip house track full of Seinfeld-like gripes about modern life. Who was this guy and what was his deal? To this day, I have yet to meet anybody in the city who knows him or anything about him. 

47. Arrested Development - "Tennessee" (1992)
While I'm casually admitting corny things about my history as a white kid listening to hip hop, let me just admit that the first rap CD that I ever bought was Arrested Development, and not the big album everyone had, I got the Unplugged album. I mostly find Arrested Development embarrassing now, but "Tennessee" actually sounds better to me now than it did in the '90s, great record. It's funny to think that Baby Tate, a rising rapper in 2022, is the daughter of Dionne Farris, the singer at the end of "Tennessee"

48. The Fugees - "Fu-Gee-La" (1996)
The Fugees became bigger and more iconic than Arrested Development, especially once they launched solo careers, but I think of them in similar terms as respectable granola post-Native Tongues pop rap, and I have little desire to listen to much of their stuff these days. This song kicks ass, though.

49. Camp Lo - "Luchini (This Is It)" (1997)
Ski Beatz produced back-to-back classics in Jay-Z's Reasonable Doubt and Camp Lo's Uptown Saturday Night, and legend has it Jay wanted the "Luchini" beat. That's an exciting hypothetical to think about, but I wouldn't change how things went down, it was the perfect track for Sonny Cheeba and Geechi Suede to talk their inscrutable and deeply coded shit over.

50. Domino - "Getto Jam" (1994)
Domino is one of those fleeting '90s rap stars that I think has been lost to time, but if you were alive back then, you probably remember at least one of the two Top 40 hits from his gold-selling self-titled album. Domino lived in Long Beach and probably got his record deal because Def Jam was looking for the next Snoop Dogg. But Domino was born in St. Louis, which is kind of interesting considering that he was one of the first rappers with a really melodic flow to hit the top 10 over half a decade before Nelly took melodic rapping to new heights.































51. Public Enemy - "911 Is A Joke" (1990)
52. Chubb Rock - "Treat Em Right" (1992)
53. 2Pac f/ Digital Underground - "I Get Around" (1993)
54. DJ Kool - "Let Me Clear My Throat" (1997)
55. Bone Thugs-N-Harmony - "Thuggish Ruggish Bone" (1994)
56. Dr. Dre f/ Snoop Dogg - "Nothin' But A 'G' Thang" (1993)
57. Silkk The Shocker f/ Mystikal - "It Ain't My Fault" (1998)
58. Ol Dirty Bastard - "Brooklyn Zoo" (1995)
59. Juvenile f/ Mannie Fresh and Lil Wayne - "Back That Azz Up" (1999)
60. Akinyele f/ Kia Jeffries - "Put It In Your Mouth" (1996)
61. Xzibit - "What U See Is What U Get" (1998)
62. A Tribe Called Quest - "Award Tour" (1993)
63. DMX - "What's My Name?" (1999)
64. Lil Kim f/ Lil Cease and Notorious B.I.G. - "Crush On You" (1996)
65. Jermaine Dupri f/ Jay-Z - "Money Ain't A Thang" (1998)
66. Mobb Deep - "Quiet Storm" (1999)
67. Gang Starr f/ Nice & Smooth - "DWYCK" (1994)
68. Makaveli f/ Outlawz - "Hail Mary" (1997)
69. Busta Rhymes - "Gimme Some More" (1998)
70. MC Lyte - "Ruffneck" (1993)
71. Outkast - "Player's Ball" (1994)
72. Queen Latifah f/ Monie Love - "Ladies First" (1990)
73. Dr. Dre f/ Snoop Dogg - "Deep Cover" (1992)
74. Big Punisher f/ Fat Joe - "Twinz (Deep Cover '98)" (1998)
75. DMX - "Get At Me Dog" (1998)
76. Lord Tariq & Peter Gunz - "Deja Vu (Uptown Baby)" (1998)
77. Notorious B.I.G. f/ Mase and Puff Daddy - "Mo Money Mo Problems" (1997)
78. Trick Daddy f/ Trina - "Nann" (1998)
79. Naughty By Nature - "Hip Hop Hooray" (1993)
80. Wu-Tang Clan - "Triumph" (1997)
81. Jay-Z - "Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)" (1998)
82. Heavy D & The Boyz -"Black Coffee" (1994)
83. Tear Da Club Up Thugs f/ Project Pat - "Slob On My Knob" (1999)
84. Eric B. & Rakim - "Juice (Know The Ledge)" (1992)
85. Nonchalant - "5 O'Clock" (1996)
86. Lauryn Hill - "Doo Wop (That Thing)" (1998)
87. Scarface - "I Seen A Man Die" (1994)
88. A Tribe Called Quest - "Check The Rhime" (1991)
89. Notorious B.I.G. - "Big Poppa" (1995)
90. Da Brat - "Funkdafied" (1994)
91. Onyx - "Slam" (1993)
92. Lil Wayne f/ Juvenile & B.G. - "The Block is Hot" (1999)
93. Jay-Z f/ Foxy Brown - "Ain't No" (1996)
94. The Pharcyde - "Passin' Me By" (1993)
95. Do Or Die f/ Twista and Johnny P - "Po Pimp" (1996)
96. Busta Rhymes - "Woo Hah!! Got You All In Check" (1996)
97. Dr. Dre f/ Snoop Dogg - "Let Me Ride" (1993)
98. The Lost Boyz - "Jeeps, Lex Coups, Bimaz & Benz" (1995)
99. DMX - "How's It Goin' Down" (1998)
100. LL Cool J - "Jingling Baby" (1990)

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