100 Albums. 100 Words.
Part Two: 21 - 40
by matthew webber
The Thesis
100 albums. 100 words. Not the "best" or "most important." Not the ones that "capture the zeitgeist." These are the albums I actually enjoy; the albums, you know, I actually listen to. The all-time, top-100, desert-island mixes. The ones that console me, cheer me, excite me. The ones that inspire me, understand me, move me. The ones I've loved again and again. The ones I can't imagine life without. The only ones worth the following reflections, all of them containing 100 words apiece. Basically, my favorite albums ever. Totally subjective? Maybe. Sure! But what's more fun than arguing music?
{Note: Part One (1 - 20) can be found here.}
21. Red Hot Chili Peppers - Blood Sugar Sex Magik
This is for Fred, wherever he is.
Fred was artistic, zany, and fun. We’d sit around or drive around and talk about nothing – which, at the time, meant everything to us – playing this album over and over, rapping along to even the B-sides: raunchy tunes like “Sir Psycho Sexy,” whose every obscenity I still know by heart. If any two people can truly have a song, this whole album belonged to us.
But after graduation, we drifted apart. He’s married now, with a couple of stepkids. His sister says he’s found religion.
I wonder if he still knows the words.
22. Weezer - The Blue Album
After the death of Kurt Cobain, I turned to Weezer for songs I could sing. Nerds like me had a new favorite band. After my arrival at Truman State University, I couldn’t turn a corner without hearing Weezer. Liberal arts kids loved that shit. Was it the jokes? The glasses? The sweaters? The fact that the singer was going to Harvard? Throughout my life, I’ve envied Rivers Cuomo: his effortless way with a powerful chorus, his unironic love of a blistering solo, his total domination of a three-minute form. Today, I remain a student of songcraft. Weezer continues giving advice.
23. Hole - Live Through This
Hate the singer. Love the songs. I crave them more than almost any others. Unless you were born around 1979 – plus or minus, what, two years? – and you couldn’t care less about the idea of “authenticity,” you’re probably like, “Really? You like this piece of shit?” and I’m like, “Yes, goddammit, I do.” It reminds me of the years when women used to scare me, as Courtney Love screamed her version of the truth. In fact, it reminds me of the last time I played it – way the hell back in 2007 – when women still scared the bejesus out of me.
24. Pink Floyd - The Wall
Pop Quiz
True/False
9) I like double albums, including ones with films.
10) If the music’s good, I only want more.
11) I don’t believe in downloading singles.
12) Basically, I’m a musical dinosaur.
Choose Your Own Adventure
13)
Do you write a review and reveal that you’re a poser – or not write anything for Spin.com at all?
25. Smashing Pumpkins - Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Another double album! Yes!!
Perhaps this album is overindulgent. Perhaps Billy Corgan’s voice is too shrill. Perhaps these lyrics suggest a troubled mind – yes, for the writer, but also for the listener. Still, I’d defend this album as a masterpiece: one whose messiness keeps it cohesive, one whose obtuseness makes it understandable. The biggest CD by my peer group’s biggest band. Song for song, the grandest statement. Track for track, the greatest value. So many singles, dazzling in their difference. So much emotion, all of it dark. Even the font enhances the spookiness. Basically, no, I wouldn’t change a thing.
26. R.E.M. - Automatic for the People
I wouldn’t say I love R.E.M. Although I like them, very, very much, I usually forget to list them as a favorite. I don’t obsess over Michael Stipe’s lyrics. I probably own less than half of their albums. When I think of R.E.M., I think of other people: former band mates (for just one summer), former co-editors (for one whole year), who worshiped this band and cherished this album, who played it so often I missed it when they stopped. “Sweetness Follows?” It surely did. The sweetest and saddest reminder of friends, of nostalgia they probably don’t know they inspired.
27. Metallica - The Black Album
Some of my favorite Metallica moments: Hearing this album for the first time in middle school, at a party in the basement of a girl I had a crush on. Learning the notes to “Nothing Else Matters,” as taught by exchange students from Spain and Brazil. Cruising through St. Louis with my friend from Vietnam, rocking out to Metallica, Megadeth, and Beethoven. Seeing a roadie on fire at a show. Discussing the album’s production in grad school, all of us agreeing, “It’s pretty much perfect.” Hearing “Enter Sandman” at a piano bar this year. Sharing Pat Boone’s version with everyone.
28. Eminem - The Marshall Mathers L.P.
The Marshall Mathers Poem
Marshall Mathers poses problems
“Stan” (with Dido!) can’t resolve ‘em
Killing Kim and Chris Kirkpatrick
Wack? Offensive? Stupid? Classic?
Baffling critics, gaffling gays
Mothers sued and mothers slayed
Truthfulness or total fiction?
Damn, the dude has crazy diction
Marshall Mathers, entertainer
Kept a lawyer on retainer
I cannot defend myself
Keeping Marshall on the shelf
In between the best CDs
Of Missy E. And Eric B.
Even though we rap along
Put another record on
Put another rapper on
Who won’t pretend to rape his mom
Marshall Mathers made a million
Making music for the children?
29. The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die
It took several years of (my) life after (his) death, but I finally understand why other rappers worship him. (I hate myself for dismissing him earlier.) It took several spins, but I worship him, too. (I hate the world for dismissing him early.) Believe the hype: Biggie Smalls is the illest, spitting with charm, charisma, and courage; spinning stories of shock and awww; mythologizing murder, mayhem, and Mom. I listen to Biggie like I watch Scorsese: savoring the stories, feeling the fiction, and disregarding my disbelief. Enter gangsta. Exit suburbia. (I’m Michael Bolton in Office Space, yo.) Vicarious villainy entertains everyone.
30. Outkast - Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
This album features everything I want: Minds expanding. Boundaries breaking. Rhythm. Melody. Wordplay. Humor. Politics. Religion. Friendship. Family. Love. Loss. Life. Pain. Joy. Bitterness. Art. Creation. Pop songs. Love songs. Battles. Jokes. Truth. Realness. Honesty. Fantasy. Stanky funk to shake your booty. Bangin’ beats to bob your head. Dre and Big Boi, still together, pushing, pulling, challenging, changing, daring, dreaming, enlightening, embracing... Hip-hop’s Beatles, hip-hop’s White Album, hip-hop for haters, hip-hop for all... Songs about vampires, Valentines, roosters... Church and war and boom! Amen. This album features everything I need.
– Best Beatles Albums: No. 5
– Best Prince Albums: No. 1
31. Stone Temple Pilots - Core
Seriously, kids, you don’t understand: I fuckin’ adored the Stone Temple Pilots! Back in the day, when I was kid, Weiland and Co. were bigger than Pearl Jam – at least they sounded that way to me, drenched in reverb and power chords and angst, drowning in whatever the hell they were singing. All I fuckin’ knew was they fuckin’ rocked my face off! I bought a guitar, and I learned their songs – sour chords for my sour disposition? – as if their hardness could rock even more. Blistering my fingers, here’s what I learned: Jesus F. Christ, this band fuckin’ rocked!!
32. Fiona Apple - When the Pawn...
Fiona Apple just might be crazy. That’s what I thought when I watched her perform, thrashing and screaming and exorcizing everything, hiding in a ball beneath her piano, singing her ballads so stately and serenely, depending on the mood or a channeled persona, selling her act or her soul or herself. Either the worst or the best concert ever! I wasted a thousand words to review it – almost as many as the album’s full title! – and still I failed to express my... what? Wonder? Gratitude? “Get well soon?” From lips to ears, from melodies to memories... Words have failed me again.
33. A Tribe Called Quest - The Low End Theory
Fun, funny, and, most of all, funky, this is what every rap album should sound like. Smoky, seductive, and smothered in soul, this is what every jazz album should sound like: The sound of college and coming of age, putting the AP Style into rap (by which I mean I listened while writing). Later, the sound of my New York summer, putting the sub-woofer into the subway (by which I mean I listened while riding). A gateway album into the genre. Hip-hop for people who don’t know they like it. Playful, witty, bangin’, etc., this is music to open minds.
34. Beatles - Rubber Soul
I didn’t always love The Beatles. As a kid, I knew them mostly as images: Beatle hair and screaming girls and psychedelic posters. It took me till high school before I knew their songs, before I spent my money on the best bootleg ever – a Japanese import of The Beatles’ early output (“Super Hits,” “Rock’n Rolls,” and “Love Ballades” [sic]) – before my friend Dave loaned me actual Beatles albums, before my friend Chrissy showed me her parents’ Beatles records, before their songs, from Rubber Soul on, themselves became friends and memories to cherish. Everything I love about music starts here.
35. Beatles - Revolver
I play these albums as halves of a whole, as yet another double album, except in my times of acute Beatlemania, when I’m fiending for everything Beatle-esque and sacred, and I play these two albums among all the others, much to the exclusion of everything else. I know I’m not being original here, and you might be immune to critical hyperbole, but I, too, believe The Beatles are the greatest, in terms of how heavily they’ve influenced my tastes and given me reasons to live each day. And this one features “Eleanor Rigby,” their saddest song and thus my favorite.
36. Carole King - Tapestry
Like numerous other classics on this list, I wasn’t alive when this album was released. (And I didn’t even hear it until my mid-twenties.) I’m old enough, though, to remember cassettes – my favorites are the ones in liquidated bins – a fact that amused at least one singer/songwriter. Carole King actually laughed at me! In Kirksville, MO, in 2004, she kindly let this reporter ask her questions, including, “Why are you stumping for Kerry?” and also, "Would you sign my tape?” “A tape?” she said. And then she laughed – totally with me, sharing the moment.
Equally noteworthy, the songcraft is ace.
37. Nirvana - Unplugged in New York
Cobain was not my generation’s voice. After all, the dude was a good decade older, and it’s not like everyone worshiped him or anything. Many of my classmates didn’t even like him, choosing to kneel before other so-called spokesmen: Tupac, Trent Reznor, Alanis Morissette... I even knew a dude who thought Primus was the greatest. But I succumbed, like I was supposed to, to the artist’s deconstruction of popular art, to one man’s attempt to find some redemption. Of course, he failed, himself and his fans – but not MTV, which repeated this eulogy. Then, I watched it. Now, I listen.
38. U2 - The Joshua Tree
U2 believes it’s the world’s biggest band, and that’s how this album sounds to me: BIG. Driving through Kansas has never sounded better, with Bono’s voice echoing over the plain, the Edge’s guitar work ringing out for miles, the other two guys in the band creating thunder... The music crescendoes... The sun or the stars... You wanna get home but you’re already there... Wherever you look, whatever you hear... America the beautiful, how sweet the sound... Except for St. Patrick’s Day, I’ve never felt more Irish... I still get goosebumps every goddamn time, even though I’m not in Kansas anymore.
39. Beatles - Magical Mystery Tour
This album, though disjointed, offers everything I’m seeking: beautiful melodies, intricate production, wit and metaphor and numerous excellent band names to steal: Corporation Teashirt, Crabalocker Fishwife, Semolina Pilchard... All that, and more, in “I Am the Walrus!” After this, I promise, I’m done with The Beatles – you’ve already read a million words – so I can write more about music from my lifetime. But this band’s music has soundtracked my life, and inspired my own attempts to make music, more than any other band.
Finally, one last note on Abbey Road: The last twenty minutes are the greatest of all time.
40. Dr. Dre - The Chronic
The beats on this album make it a masterpiece, still sounding fresh a decade-plus later. The lyrics, however, make this old man cringe. Full of misogyny, murder, and more!* I can’t defend their anti-woman stance. Unless, that is, I’m being philosophical, or feeling argumentative, or viewing them historically (most of the disses were aimed at Eazy-E). Here’s an example, quoted from memory, and totally worth a couple dozen words:
Gap teeth in your mouth so my dick’s got to fit
With my nuts on your tonsils, when you’re onstage rapping at your wack-ass concert
Hateful. Repugnant. Guiltily hilarious.
* More misogyny.
The Invitation
Got some free time? Wanna write something? This "100 Words" project is open to everyone. If you like what you see here -- or, even better, if you think it sucks -- I’d love to see a list from you! What are your own favorite 100 albums? Films? Books? Breakfast cereals? Mustaches throughout history? The possibilities are truly infinite. Just rank your favorite whatevers (that’s the fun and easy part), describe them in EXACTLY 100 words (that’s the challenging but fun part), and post your list. Then we can trade our links – and our arguments. For more information, e-mail me at mattwebber@gmail.com.
The Disclaimer
All words were counted using the Word Count tool in my version of Word Perfect.
Visit the author's website at www.matthewwebber.net.
Copyright (c) 2007 erasing clouds |
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