My Top 100 Singles of 1973

Thursday, July 25, 2024
 









Here's the Spotify playlist:

1. Marvin Gaye - "Let's Get It On"
2. Led Zeppelin - "Over The Hills And Far Away"
3. Todd Rundgren - "Hello It's Me"
4. Steely Dan - "Reelin' In The Years"
5. The Isley Brothers - "That Lady"
6. Stealers Wheel - "Stuck In The Middle With You"
7. The Allman Brothers Band - "Ramblin' Man"
8. Elton John - "Saturday Night's Alright For Fighting"
9. Gladys Knight & The Pips - "Midnight Train To Georgia"
10. Lou Reed – “Walk On The Wild Side”
11. The Edgar Winter Group - "Frankenstein"
12. Deep Purple - "Smoke On The Water"
13. Bruce Springsteen - "Rosalita (Come Out Tonight)"
14. Al Green - "Love And Happiness"
15. Faces – “Ooh La La”
16. The Doobie Brothers - "Long Train Runnin'" 
17. Bob Marley and the Wailers – “Get Up, Stand Up”
18. Stevie Wonder - "You Are The Sunshine Of My Life"
19. ZZ Top - "La Grange"
20. T. Rex - "20th Century Boy"
21. Steely Dan - "My Old School"
22. Harold Melvin & The Blue Notes – “The Love I Lost”
23. Aretha Franklin - "Until You Come Back To Me (That's What I'm Gonna Do)"
24. Charlie Rich – “Behind Closed Doors”
25. Led Zeppelin - "Dancing Days"
26. Pink Floyd - "Money"
27. Merle Haggard – “If We Make It Through December”
28. Paul McCartney & Wings – “Jet”
29. The Four Tops - "Ain't No Woman (Like The One I've Got)"
30. Carly Simon - "You're So Vain"
31. The Allman Brothers Band - "Jessica"
32. Timmy Thomas - "Why Can't We Live Together"
33. The Who - "5:15" 
34. MFSB featuring the Three Degrees – “Love Is The Message”
35. Johnnie Taylor – “Cheaper To Keep Her”
36. Millie Jackson – “It Hurts So Good”
37. The Spinners - "Could It Be That I'm Falling In Love"
38. Cher – “Half-Breed”
39. Joe Walsh and Barnstorm – “Rocky Mountain Way”
40. John Denver - "Rocky Mountain High"
41. The Doobie Brothers - "China Grove"
42. Eddie Kendricks – “Keep On Truckin’”
43. The Honey Drippers - "Impeach The President"
44. David Bowie - "The Jean Genie"
45. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Simple Man"
46. Bob Marley and the Wailers – “I Shot The Sheriff”
47. The O'Jays - "Love Train"
48. Roberta Flack - "Killing Me Softly With His Song"
49. Paul McCartney & Wings - "Live And Let Die"
50. Bob Dylan - "Knockin' On Heaven's Door"
51. Ike & Tina Turner – “Nutbush City Limits”
52. The Edgar Winter Group - "Free Ride"
53. Ringo Starr – “Photograph”
54. Queen - "Keep Yourself Alive"
55. Little Feat - "Dixie Chicken"
56. Stevie Wonder - "Higher Ground"
57. Al Green - "Call Me (Come Back Home)"
58. Diana Ross - "Touch Me In The Morning"
59. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Gimme Three Steps"
60. Elton John - "Daniel"
61. Sly & The Family Stone - "If You Want Me To Stay"
62. Dobie Gray - "Drift Away"
63. The Who - "Love Reign O'er Me"
64. Led Zeppelin - "The Ocean"
65. The Four Tops – “Are You Man Enough”
66. Chicago – “Feelin’ Stronger Every Day”
67. The Eagles - "Desperado"
68. Jerry Jeff Walker – “Desperados Waiting For A Train”
69. The Moody Blues - "I'm Just A Singer (In A Rock And Roll Band)"
70. George Jones and Tammy Wynette - "We're Gonna Hold On"
71. The Carpenters – “Top Of The World”
72. Stoney Edwards – “Hank And Lefty Raised My Country Soul”
73. B.W. Stevenson – “My Maria”
74. The Pointer Sisters – “Yes We Can Can”
75. Bob Marley and the Wailers – “Stir It Up”
76. Earth, Wind & Fire – “Evil”
77. New York Dolls – “Personality Crisis”
78. Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye – “You’re A Special Part Of Me”
79. Johnny Rodriguez – “Ridin’ My Thumb To Mexico”
80. Billy Joe Shaver – “Old Five And Dimers Like Me”
81. Jimmy Buffett – “He Went To Paris”
82. Billy Preston – “Space Race”
83. Steely Dan - "Show Biz Kids"
84. The Eagles - "Tequila Sunrise"
85. Paul Simon - "Kodachrome"
86. Thin Lizzy - "The Rocker"
87. Bruce Springsteen - "Blinded By The Light"
88. The Rolling Stones - "Angie"
89. Led Zeppelin - "D'yer Maker"
90. Al Green - "Here I Am (Come And Take Me)"
91. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Tuesday's Gone"
92. Willie Nelson - "Stay All Night (Stay A Little Longer)"
93. Conway Twitty – “You’ve Never Been This Far Before”
94. Jimmy Buffett – “The Great Filling Station Holdup”
95. Dr. John - "Right Place Wrong Time"
96. Dr. Hook & The Medicine Show - "The Cover Of The Rolling Stone"
97. Kris Kristofferson – “Why Me”
98. Bobby Goldsboro – “Summer (The First Time)”
99. Pink Floyd - "Us And Them"
100. Elton John - "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road"

It's cool to see a new era taking shape here, "The Love I Lost" and "Love Is The Message" are two of the Philly Soul hits that really influenced the sound of disco, and "Why Can't We Live Together" was one of the first major hits with a drum machine. Also, weird to realize that "Rocky Mountain High" and "Rocky Mountain Way" were hits in the same year, I love random stuff like that. 

Previously:
My Top 50 Albums of 1973
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1974
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1975
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1976
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1977
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1978
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1979
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1980
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1981
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1982
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1983
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1984
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1985
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1986
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1987
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1988
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1989
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1990
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1991
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1992
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1993
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1994
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1995
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1996
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1997
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1998
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1999
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2000
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2001
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2002
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2003
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2004
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2005
My Top 25 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2006
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2007
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2008
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2009
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2010
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2011
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2012
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2013
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2014
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2015
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2016
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2017
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2018
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2019
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2020
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2021
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2022
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2023 

4:00 AM

My Top 50 Albums of 1973

Tuesday, July 23, 2024

 




Here's the Spotify playlist with a deep cut from each album:


1. Pink Floyd - Dark Side of the Moon
2. Steely Dan - Countdown To Ecstasy
3. Led Zeppelin - Houses of the Holy
4. Marvin Gaye - Let's Get It On
5. Stevie Wonder – Innervisions
6. The Isley Brothers – 3 + 3
7. Elton John - Goodbye Yellow Brick Road
8. Little Feat - Dixie Chicken
9. Daryl Hall & John Oates - Abandoned Luncheonette
10. Bruce Springsteen - The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle
11. New York Dolls - New York Dolls
12. Iggy & The Stooges – Raw Power
13. Willie Nelson - Shotgun Willie
14. Herbie Hancock – Head Hunters
15. Can - Future Days
16. The Who - Quadrophenia
17. John Cale - Paris 1919
18. Tom Waits - Closing Time
19. Sly & The Family Stone - Fresh
20. Rory Gallagher – Tattoo
21. Paul Simon - There Goes Rhymin' Simon
22. T. Rex – Tanx
23. James Brown – The Payback
24. Paul McCartney & Wings – Band On The Run
25. ZZ Top - Tres Hombres
26. Lynyrd Skynyrd - Pronounced Leh-nerd Skin-nerd
27. Gram Parsons – GP
28. Jackson Browne - For Everyman
29. Roxy Music - For Your Pleasure
30. Elton John - Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player
31. Sparks – A Woofer In Tweeter’s Clothing
32. The Allman Brothers Band - Brothers And Sisters
33. War – Deliver The Word
34. Loudon Wainwright III - Attempted Mustache
35. The Rolling Stones - Goats Head Soup
36. Bob Marley & The Wailers – Burnin’
37. Al Green - Call Me
38. Blue Oyster Cult – Tyranny And Mutation
39. Todd Rundgren - A Wizard, A True Star
40. Ike & Tina Turner – Nutbush City Limits
41. David Bowie - Aladdin Sane
42. Montrose – Montrose
43. Roberta Flack – Killing Me Softly
44. Grateful Dead – Wake of the Flood
45. Fraser & DeBolt – With Pleasure
46. Ringo Starr - Ringo
47. George Harrison – Living In The Material World
48. Yes - Tales From The Topographic Oceans
49. Thin Lizzy - Vagabonds Of The Western World
50. Van Morrison - Hard Nose the Highway

On Saturdays, WKHS plays a lot of cool obscure vintage hard rock. And back in June they played a set of songs by the British guitarist Rory Gallagher and his band Taste on the anniversary of his death in 1995, and I was blown away, instantly became a fan. I also had never heard the Canadian folk duo Fraser & DeBolt until a few weeks ago and really fell for their two albums. I'm mostly catching up on widely acknowledged classics here but I'm glad I'm also educating myself about some more obscure acts. With these lists, I often find myself finishing them when I can't stand to find another record that needs to be in the top 50 that's going to push out an excellent album by an artist I love. 1973 is an insanely stacked year, though, so I just went ahead listening and sacrificing really cool records by Queen and John Prine and Lou Reed and Funkadelic and Aerosmith and The Kinks and ELO and Sabbath and Donny Hathaway. 

4:01 AM

Movie Diary

Monday, July 22, 2024

 






a) The First Omen
Nell Tiger Free was amazing on "Servant" and never nominated for any major awards or given enough praise, so I was really happy to see her star in a successful movie in an iconic horror franchise. The First Omen is also the debut feature by Arkasha Stevenson, who directed one of the best seasons of SyFy's anthology series "Channel Zero." I wouldn't say The First Omen is a masterpiece, but it's far above average for a new school prequel to a classic, with a handful of really chilling, masterfully staged scenes, and great performances by Free, Ralph Ineson, and Ishtar Currie-Wilson (Bill Nighy felt kind of underused, but whatever). 

b) Despicable Me 4
Back in 2010, two similarly themed "supervillain redemption story" animated films were released, and Despicable Me made more money than Megamind by a respectable but not huge margin. There is a vocal minority who says Megamind was a better movie, but I feel like they're just bitter and hate the minions, it's no contest. 14 years later, there's finally a Megamind sequel, but it's on Peacock and Will Ferrell is not in it. Meanwhile, Ferrell does play the main antagonist in the fourth Despicable Me movie with a bad French accent, and it's probably the worst thing about the movie. I took my 9-year-old and 14-year-old sons to see it, we had fun. Definitely not the best movie in the franchise but there were some good parts, I liked the scene where John DiMaggio (Bender of "Futurama" fame) plays a bus driver. Dr. Nefario makes a brief return, but they replaced Russell Brand with a new voice actor, thankfully. 

c) Good Grief
Dan Levy's debut feature is pretty well made and impressive, especially considering that he only directed three episodes of "Schitt's Creek." It's a familiar sort of dramedy where the main character's spouse suddenly dies and they rely on friends to get through it and eventually move on with their life, and I was surprised that it was a little maudlin and light on comic relief (Kaitlyn Dever is hilarious in the funeral scene, the movie could've used a little more of that kind of thing). Still pretty enjoyable, though, mainly because Levy and the two friends, played by Ruth Negga and Himesh Patel, make for a great cast. 

d) Little Wing
Little Wing is based on a lovely New Yorker article by Susan Orlean about a 13-year-old girl who owns racing pigeons. Watching it, though, I was reminded of Adaptation 's plot about Charlie Kaufman adapting an Orlean book. The movie adds a host of different plot devices to make the story more exciting, including Russian gangsters and a heist and divorce and suicidal ideation. It almost feels like it could've been adapted by Kaufman's fictitious brother Donald. Not a terrible movie but a really frustrating and disappointing one that kind of wasted Brian Cox in a very boilerplate cranky old man role. 

e) Pig
Speaking of Nicolas Cage! I decided to finally check out Pig since the director, Michael Sarnoski, did the new A Quiet Place prequel, and Cage also has a hit right now with Longlegs. I haven't seen a lot of Cage's movies from the past decade that seemed to lean into him being a cult hero or camp icon or whatever, and I was a little worried that Pig would be that. My wife came home the night I was watching it and asked what it's about, and she was like "so it's John Wick with a pig instead of a dog?" So I was pleasantly surprised that it was a pretty quiet, soulful movie that never went for the big climactic action you sort of expected, and Cage's performance is one of the best I've seen from him in a long time. Having chapter titles for a 90-minute movie with a fairly straightforward plot felt a bit pretentious an unearned, though.  

f) Aftersun
Aftersun is the debut feature by Charlotte Wells after she directed a few short films and it's good, but I don't know, it feels a little like a short film stretched out. It's a sad and poignant film and Paul Mescal and Frankie Corio give great nuanced performances. But you could have really gotten all the key scenes and points of this over with in 10-20 minutes, which would've made more sense given the subtle show-don't-tell nature of what the movie's about. I don't know, maybe I'm just irritable about the long scenes where a Blur song gets slowed down to half speed or a Queen song plays with a bunch of dramatic reverb, I know people loved those scenes but they didn't work for me. 

g) Plus One
I checked this out based on enjoying Maya Erskine and Jack Quaid's TV work, and it really surpassed my expectations, one of the better rom coms I've seen in the last few years. Erskine and Quaid play two platonic college friends who decide to be each other's plus one for a series of weddings they've been invited to, and it takes some pretty predictable turns from there, but they pull it off well, the characters and the story feel fully fleshed out and resonant and the comedy is character-driven and never too over-the-top. 

h) Brats
A lot of what I'd read this movie has kind of circled on the idea that Andrew McCarthy has been one of the less successful "brat pack" actors since the Breakfast Club/St. Elmo's Fire era. And so of course he's the one who's haunted by it and thinks it negatively impacted them, while his peers like Emilio Estevez or Demi Moore or Rob Lowe have better things to do than make a documentary about what a magazine writer called them in the '80s. But I dunno, I enjoyed the movie, I like that McCarthy took this thoughtful, bittersweet approach to being part of a pop culture phenomenon. And I think maybe he did deserve a better career that he might've had without all that brat pack baggage, now and then I'll see him in something and think he's a striking actor with a unique screen presence, like when he played a contract killer on "Good Girls." 

i) It's Only Life After All
This documentary about the Indigo Girls reminded me of the recent documentary about Cyndi Lauper. It's nice to get a career-spanning doc about artists who are just genuinely good people and have been activists for good causes and have a few classic songs but probably don't get enough credit for their artistic legacy as a whole. And you get a nice nuanced look at the differences between Emily Saliers and Amy Ray's personalities and songwriting styles, and the different challenges they've faced in life individually or together. 

I came home from work one night and my wife was watching this German movie on Netflix that turned out to be pretty good. It's about a terrorists hijacking an airline and one of the passengers turns out to be a vampire. Sounds a little ridiculous but the way they pulled off that premise is really clever and the acting and visual effects were very good. 

4:00 AM

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 363: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard

Thursday, July 18, 2024

 





King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard's new album Flight b741 is out on August 9th, so I wanted to look at their rapidly expanding discography before it gets even bigger. 

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Sea of Trees
2. Float Along - Fill Your Lungs
3. Work This Time
4. I'm In Your Mind
5. Sense
6. Road Train
7. Flying Microtonal Banana
8. Polygondwanaland
9. Superposition
10. Plastic Boogie
11. Hell
12. Minimum Brain Size
13. Supreme Ascendancy
14. Black Hot Soup
15. The Garden Goblin
16. Lava
17. Gondii
18. Witchcraft
19. Swan Song

Track 1 from 12 Bar Bruise (2012)
Track 2 from Float Along - Fill Your Lungs (2013)
Track 3 from Oddments (2014)
Track 4 from I'm In Your Mind Fuzz (2014)
Track 5 from Paper Mache Dream Balloon (2015)
Track 6 from Nonagon Infinity (2016)
Track 7 from Flying Microtonal Banana (2017)
Track 8 from Polygondwanaland (2017)
Track 9 from Gumboot Soup (2017)
Track 10 from Fishing For Fishies (2019)
Track 11 from Infest The Rats' Nest (2019)
Track 12 from K.G. (2020)
Track 13 from L.W. (2021)
Track 14 from Butterfly 3000 (2021)
Track 15 from Omnium Gatherum (2022)
Track 16 from Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms and Lava (2022)
Track 17 from Changes (2022)
Track 18 from PetroDragonic Apocalypse; or, Dawn of Eternal Night: An Annihilation of Planet Earth and the Beginning of Merciless Damnation (2023)
Track 19 from The Silver Cord (2023)

King Gizzard & The Lizard formed in Melbourne in 2010 (our honeymoon was in Australia, and Melbourne was probably my favorite city we visited, the one that I could most easily imagine living in, so I like hearing music from Melbourne). The band started out with seven members, although it's been down to six since the 2021 departure of drummer/keyboardist Eric Moore, who has focused on running the band's label, Flightless Records. 

The band has released 25 albums since 2021, and the sheer volume of their output has become kind of their defining feature, particularly after they released five albums in 2017 and then three albums just in October 2022. The quality has been really impressively high across their discography, though, as they started from a psychedelic/garage rock foundation and then made albums that stretched towards metal and dance music and jazz and, ugh, there's some rapping on some later albums too. I couldn't even cover every album in 80 minutes, but I mostly skipped collaborative albums or the records where every song is over 10 minutes long. 

I went for kind of a mix of live favorites and songs with a lot of streams along with personal favorites and songs that seemed to make the most sense in the playlist. I started listening to the band in 2017 and hadn't caught up on some of the early albums, so I'd never heard the first two songs on the playlist and really love those songs now. "Work This Time" is by far the band's top track on Spotify, which surprised me a little, it's kind of lo-fi even compared to a lot of their other songs. I've seen a theory that its appearance on the Spotify playlist 'Modern Psychedelia' is the main reason. A lot of the band's later albums have tracks running together with no gaps, which makes it really difficult to drop those songs into playlists. And there are one or two incredibly abrupt transitions here, which I try to avoid. I apologize if they annoy you as much as they annoy me. 

I have a whole thing with the 5/4 time signature: a few years ago I made an entire album in 5/4, and every year since, I've had a May 4th post with a new song and a DJ mix of music in the 5/4 time signature. Certain artists who mess with different time signatures have made multiple appearances in the series (Soundgarden, Rush, Peter Gabriel, Radiohead), but King Gizzard is the only band that I've included in all four mixes so far. "Black Hot Soup" was in my 2022 mix, and "Float Along - Fill Your Lungs" and "Polygondwanaland" and "Superposition" and "Plastic Boogie" and "Supreme Acendancy" will probably appear in some of my future DJ sets. And that's not even all of King Gizzard's songs that are partly or fully in 5/4 by a long shot (there's also "Crumbling Castle," "The River," "Theia," "The Land Before Timeland," "Flamethrower," "Wah Wah," "Atraxia," and I'm sure others I haven't noticed yet). They might be the only rock band that I can definitively say has written more songs in 5/4 than I have, and I find their use of it to be varied and inspiring. 

4:00 AM

Tuesday, July 16, 2024

 





I appeared on the latest episode of the Shoving Wilco podcast to discuss my recent Spin piece about Wilco. 

10:23 AM

My Top 100 Singles of 1974

Monday, July 15, 2024
























Here's the Spotify playlist:

1. Golden Earring - "Radar Love"
2. Elton John - "Bennie And The Jets"
3. Steely Dan - "Rikki Don't Lose That Number"
4. Dolly Parton – “Jolene”
5. Paul McCartney & Wings - "Band On The Run"
6. James Brown - "The Payback"
7. Stevie Wonder - "Living For The City"
8. Billy Joel - "Piano Man"
9. David Bowie - "Rebel Rebel"
10. Barry White - "Can't Get Enough Of Your Love, Babe"
11. Bad Company - "Can't Get Enough"
12. Kool & The Gang - "Jungle Boogie"
13. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Free Bird"
14. Gregg Allman - "Midnight Rider"
15. Elton John - "The Bitch Is Back"
16. Queen - "Killer Queen"
17. Joni Mitchell – “Help Me”
18. Billy Swan – “I Can Help”
19. Rufus and Chaka Khan - "Tell Me Something Good"
20. Linda Ronstadt - "You're No Good"
21. George Jones - "The Grand Tour"
22. The Rolling Stones - "Doo Doo Doo Doo Doo (Heartbreaker)" 
23. Dolly Parton – “I Will Always Love You”
24. Rush - "Working Man"
25. The Eagles - "Already Gone"
26. Roberta Flack - "Feel Like Makin' Love"
27. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Sweet Home Alabama"
28. Bachman-Turner Overdrive -"You Ain't Seen Nothing Yet"
29. Pink Floyd - "Time / Breathe (Reprise)"
30. Barry White - "Never, Never Gonna Give Ya Up"
31. The Hues Corporation - "Rock The Boat"
32. George McCrae - "Rock Your Baby"
33. Aerosmith - "Train Kept A Rollin'"
34. Redbone - "Come And Get Your Love"
35. The Steve Miller Band - "The Joker"
36. Robert Palmer – “Sneakin’ Sally Through The Alley”
37. Lou Reed – “Sally Can’t Dance”
38. Stevie Wonder - "Don't You Worry 'Bout A Thing"
39. Marvin Gaye - "Distant Lover (live)" 
40. Jimmy Buffett – “A Pirate Looks At Forty”
41. Dionne Warwick and The Spinners – “Then Came You”
42. Willie Nelson - "Bloody Mary Morning"
43. B.T. Express – “Do It (‘Til You’re Satisfied)” 
44. The O'Jays - "For The Love Of Money"
45. Big Star – “September Gurls”
46. Al Green – “Sha-La-La (Make Me Happy)”
47. Carl Carlton – “Everlasting Love”
48. The Jackson 5 - "Dancing Machine"
49. Queen - "Liar"
50. The Who - "The Real Me"
51. Paper Lace – “The Night Chicago Died”
52. Stevie Wonder - "You Haven't Done Nothin'"
53. Moe Bandy – “I Just Started Hatin’ Cheatin’ Songs Today”
54. Billy Joel - "The Entertainer"
55. Cheech & Chong - "Earache My Eye"
56. George Jones - 'These Days (I Barely Get By)" 
57. Kool & The Gang - "Hollywood Swinging"
58. The Love Unlimited Orchestra - "Love's Theme"
59. Elton John - "Don't Let The Sun Go Down On Me"
60. Bad Company - "Bad Company"
61. Steely Dan - "Pretzel Logic"
62. David Bowie – “Diamond Dogs”
63. Aerosmith - "Same Old Song And Dance"
64. Little Feat - "Oh Atlanta"
65. Bobby Bland – “Ain’t No Love In The Heart of The City”
66. The Isley Brothers - "Summer Breeze"
67. Henry Chapin - "Cat's In The Cradle"
68. Brian Protheroe – “Pinball”
69. Carl Douglas - "Kung Fu Fighting"
70. Earth, Wind & Fire – “Devotion”
71. George Jones - "The Door"
72. The Kiki Dee Band – “I’ve Got The Music In Me”
73. Marvin Gaye - "You Sure Love To Ball"
74. Queen - "Now I'm Here"
75. Daryl Hall & John Oates - "When The Morning Comes"
76. Jimmy Buffett – “Come Monday”
77. Carly Simon - “Haven’t Got Time For The Pain”
78. Lynyrd Skynyrd - "Call Me The Breeze"
79. The Rolling Stones - "It's Only Rock 'n Roll (But I Like It)" 
80. David Essex - "Rock On"
81. Curtis Mayfield – “Sweet Exorcist”
82. Rufus & Chaka Khan – “You Got The Love”
83. Stevie Wonder - "He's Misstra Know-It-All"
84. Carole King - "Jazzman"
85. Frank Zappa – “Don’t Eat The Yellow Snow”
86. Electric Light Orchestra – “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head”
87. John Lennon - "Whatever Gets You Thru The Night"
88. Bill Withers – “The Same Love That Made Me Laugh”
89. America – “Tin Man”
90. The Rolling Stones - "Ain't Too Proud To Beg"
91. Billy Joel - "Captain Jack"
92. Carly Simon & James Taylor - "Mockingbird"
93. Terry Jacks - "Seasons In The Sun"
94. Neil Young – “Walk On”
95. T. Rex - "Teenage Dream"
96. The Three Degrees – “When Will I See You Again”
97. Leonard Cohen – “Lover Lover Lover”
98. Chicago – “Wishing You Were Here”
99. Eric Clapton - "I Shot The Sheriff"
100. John Denver – “Back Home Again”

The only song not on the playlist is "Earache My Eye." I see ads for Cheech & Chong's cannabis gummies every single time I look at Twitter, but their biggest song isn't on Spotify? Priorities, guys! I was fascinated to learn that Barry White's "Can't Get Enough of Your Love, Babe" and Bad Company's "Can't Get Enough" were both in the top 20 of the Hot 100 at the same time. America couldn't get enough of "can't get enough of your love" choruses in the fall of 1974. 

Previously:
My Top 50 Albums of 1974
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1975
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1976
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1977
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1978
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1979
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1980
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1981
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1982
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1983
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1984
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1985
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1986
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1987
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1988
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1989
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1990
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1991
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1992
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1993
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1994
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1995
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1996
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1997
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1998
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 1999
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2000
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2001
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2002
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2003
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2004
My Top 25 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2005
My Top 25 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2006
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2007
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2008
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2009
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2010
My Top 50 Albums and Top 50 Singles of 2011
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2012
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2013
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2014
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2015
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2016
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2017
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2018
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2019
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2020
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2021
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2022
My Top 50 Albums and Top 100 Singles of 2023

4:00 AM

TV Diary

Friday, July 12, 2024

 




The second season of "Severance" is still months away, but "Sunny" seems at least superficially ready to fulfull a similar niche: an actor people know from "Parks & Rec" (Rashida Jones) in a dark Apple TV+ comedy/drama with an unsettling sci-fi premise. Jones's character lives in a near-future Japan where talking service robots are fully integrated into society, and Jones hates them because a robot killed her father. But the titular robot, Sunny, is her only companion as she tries to solve the mystery of her missing husband and son, so a lot of the show is her having surly conversations with a chipper robot. Creator Katie Robbins has mostly written on more conventional cable drama fare ("The Affair," "The Last Tycoon"), so I'm a little surprised but I think she's come up with something pretty promising here. 

Everybody knows Lady Jane Grey died at 17. What this show presupposes is, maybe she didn't? It feels like there are so many shows like this now: soapy, irreverent historical shows full of modern dialogue and 21st century pop music, and often race blind casting and fantasy elements. "The Great" and "Dickinson" and "Mary & George" are the best of these, "Bridgerton" kind of counts too and has its moments, but "My Lady Jane" is in the just alright category with "The Buccaneers." Why are there people shapeshifting into animals? What the hell is going on? 

A Netflix show about people in London who start to develop superpowers. It follows a lot of the conventions of the superhero origin story genre, but is much more about the characters than the action scenes, I like it. 

Apple TV+ is slowly starting to make more non-English language shows, and this one takes place in Spain but has a familiar American star, Eva Longoria. A nice character-driven dramedy, don't love it but it's pleasant and sometimes funny or poignant. 

Tatiana Maslany starred in the original "Orphan Black" and then "She-Hulk: Attorney At Law," and Krysten Ritter starred in "Jessica Jones" and now "Orphan Black: Echoes," which makes me feel like there's an MCU/"Orphan Black" exchange program going on. Maslany's virtuoso performance as several clones with distinct personalities was always a big part of the draw of the original series, so I'm surprised that's not really the point of the spinoff, which simply takes place in the same narrative a few decades later, with the daughter of Maslany's character as a supporting character. I like it so far, but at a few episodes in I feel like I'm still waiting to see what the point of it all is supposed to be. 

I am fine with the consensus that "The Bear" is one of the best shows on television, but I do sympathize with the vocal detractors and understand a lot of the criticisms. My two least favorite episodes so far are the season 2 Thanksgiving episode that was overstuffed with celebrity cameos, and the season 3 premiere that was basically one long, interminable montage with frequent clips of the famous people from the Thanksgiving episode. After that rough patch, though, I mostly really enjoyed season 3. Neil was a very likeable character until they started constantly pairing him up with a similar but more broadly comedic character, Teddy, in the most tiresomely sitcommy scenes on the show, but there was a lot of great stuff, including the episode centered on Tina and the episode that introduced "Billions" creator Brian Koppelman as an obnoxious character named Computer. 

The first three seasons of "Shoresy" had a really enjoyable arc that is basically the end of Shoresy's hockey career has he gets too old to play. So I like that they ended season 3 basically calling it the end of "part 1" of the series and implying that he'll return in season 4 with a new job and probably a new supporting cast. I'm still amazed they took such a one-note supporting character from "Letterkenny" and made him a fairly nuanced protagonist. 

Just before season 4 started, Amazon announced that "The Boys" will end after season 5, which I think is a good call. They've kept escalating the insanity of the plot and the violence and the gore so consistently that I think it's good that they steer toward an ending before they break the show on some level and it becomes too ridiculous to enjoy. What I've watched of this season has been good so far, Sister Sage is a great character. And Firecracker continues the show's insidious tradition of evil women that I find extremely attractive. 

This is one of those British cult comedies that only had 6 episodes a couple decades ago but people still talk about it. And at this point I feel like I want to see everything Matt Berry's ever been in, so I decided to look for it on streaming services and fortunately Peacock has it. Pretty great, love the really hyper specific parody of the tone and visual style of low budget '80s horror. 

I had to watch this Netflix series just on the strength of the title, but it's actually a pretty good show about the true story of a doctor in 1970s Thailand who published a newspaper column about sex under the name Doctor Climax. It reminds me of "Masters of Sex" or even "Minx" in terms of being a smart, playful, sometimes titillating show about a period of time when really basic sexual education was still controversial. 

Another Netflix show with an appealingly ridiculous name, and this was really follows through on the absurdity. It's about a woman who is transformed into a chicken nugget by a machine, and her father tries to turn her back into a human. 

A South Korean show that's kind of a straightforward high school soap opera but in a high concept premise where kids are sorted into different education tracks from the moment they're born and this school is just for the top 0.01% of kids. 

A Netflix horror anthology from Indonesia, pretty good from what I've watched so far, doesn't have a huge budget but I like the style of the visual effects. 

A Brazilian show about a woman who is pregnant with twins by two different men, her philandering and estranged husband and her rapist. Not a good premise for a soap opera!

A Turkish romcom series on Netflix, decent light entertainment. 

This Korean show on Netflix is like a reality competition with actors and celebrities in this hokey mystery building trying to win challenges. It's really crappy and low budget, feels like you're just watching security camera footage from an escape room. 

This PBS miniseries does a pretty good job of telling the story of disco in three episodes. The first, my favorite, gets into stuff like David Mancuso's loft parties and the musical roots of disco in Philly Soul, and there's a great interview with Earl Young, the Sigma Sound drummer widely credited with developing what became the typical disco drum beat. The second episode covers the peak of the disco phenomenon, Saturday Night Fever and all that. And the third episode is about the backlash and Disco Demolition Night and things going back underground and starting to evolve into house music and rave culture. I wish the production values were a little better, but a good series, mostly stuff I already knew but I learned a little and really enjoyed the new interviews with some legendary people. 

This 2-part doc on Paramount+ is about Melissa Etheridge playing a concert at a women's prison in her hometown. But it also goes all through her musical history and how she's been performing at prisons since she was a teen blues prodigy, as well as how she lost her son to opioid addiction and has a lot of real empathy for the women who've written to her from prison and the circumstances that brought them there. So it's mostly a concert film with some poignant interviews in between, although the new song she debuts, inspired by the prisoners she's met, eh, it's not her best work. 

With the Olympics coming up, it's cool to have something like this Netflix docuseries that lets you get to know stars like Sha'Carri Richardson a little better. 

No, it's not about Nick Cannon! Tip your waiters, folks! The Dutch sperm bank donor that this series is about didn't participate in the production, although he has since clarified that he "only" has 550 children. I dunno, man, shit is weird.

As famous as Jonestown is, I'm surprised I haven't seen something like this tell the story in this level of detail before, they talked to survivors and witnesses and it's really chilling stuff. 

For some reason, it's been two years since the second season of "P-Valley" aired and it's still not clear when season 3 is coming. In the meantime, Starz made this docuseries hosted by one of the show's stars, about a real strip club (but one in Memphis, so not exactly where the show takes place, Mississippi). I like the tone of the show, like "P-Valley" it treats the people in the club with respect while still being pretty blunt about the fact that it is a strip club, but it really feels like a thrown together stopgap for impatient fans of "P-Valley." 

I've watched the American and Italian versions of this show, and I think the French version is the one I enjoy the least. In the latest season, they got a singer who doesn't rap to be a judge, which feels like a bad indication that France doesn't even have enough successful rappers to make a hip hop competition series work. 

I got my 9-year-old the Exploding Kittens card game for Christmas last year, and he really loves it. It's a pretty fun game, there's a lot of luck and silliness but a decent amount of strategy involved as well, we got the expansion pack so we can play with more people at family gatherings. I was a little disappointed to learn that Netflix's "Exploding Kittens" series is an 'adult cartoon' because my kid wouldn't really be able to watch it. But after seeing an episode, I dunno, maybe it's for the best that he doesn't watch it, it's really just dumb and boring. I don't expect a direct adaptation of the game or a masterfully plotted comedy, but the whole tone and pace of it feels so stale. 

A sci-fi fantasy animated series on Apple TV+, seems okay with some cool-looking beasts but I really do not like the animation style, the aesthetic and the color scheme have such a sickly pastel new age look. 

I'm glad that Apple TV+ is dedicated to doing so many Peanuts cartoons. The voice cast never sounds quite right to me as someone who grew up on the old animated specials, but they get the animation style and overall tone more or less right, and this latest one is a cute series with Snoopy and Woodstock and his bird friends at a summer camp. 

11:23 AM