50albumsfor50years

Hey Siri, what is the musical polar opposite of last week's post : The Spinners? The Jesus Lizard Goat 1991 This one will come as a bit of a surprise to a subsection of my friends. In the late 80s and early 90s I was fortunate enough to work at the best radio station in the world, WRUV . It was a fun time to be in college radio. The first guard of alternative was going mainstream and an explosion of venues, record labels, and 'zines lead to way more experimentation in genres and music. Making their appearance on the scene was techno, rap (in an expanding buffet of sub-genres), industrial, and, of course, grunge. So here is the true confession time: I never much cared for grunge. At that time of my life I was neither particularly angry nor disaffected with life and I still loved melody, harmony, and clean production values. So while my fellow DJs were enjoying Nirvana, Melvins, Killdozer, I was happily ensconced in ok alt rock (think any band inspired by REM.) When I di...

I have good friend Alice Neiley to thank for this week's choice. In a back and forth conversation, she wondered if I had much experience with Motown. I informed her I did not. So she recommended the 1973 self-titled album from the Spinners. The Spinners 1973 What a great choice. My music library is woefully underrepresented with Motown. I have no real excuse for this. I love the music. I guess I just never felt any urgency to own any of it. Growing up in a white middle class suburb of Baltimore probably didn't help. I definitely grew up with the idea that the music that appeared on Soul Train was not meant for me. (And to be fair, it wasn't! But that is no excuse for not appreciating it.) This was not a conscious thought but just sort of an acceptance of my place in the world. I suspect there were many factors that finally got me to snap out of this mindset and see beyond the limits of my experience, at least musically, but certainly falling in love with a woman how...

Sorry, this is going to be long. This past summer, I read the excellent love letter to Prog Rock "The Show That Never Ends" by David Weigel . Weigel is clearly a libertarian of some degree so he is sort of the perfect figure to write this book. It is full of excellent history, first hand interviews, and well researched snippets. It is also probably 100 pages too short based on some editor who didn't get why we needed all those extra notes, words, and irrelevant tangents. Two things struck me while reading the book. 1) Prog must be the whitest, malest of all (pop) musical forms. 2) The best part of reading this book was firing up Youtube and trying to listen to the songs he was writing about and then realizing, because this is prog, that you are already at the end of the chapter and you still are only a 1/16th of the way into the song. As a result, there were plenty of artists mentioned in the book that I never really listened to. Prog actually was never my scene. It c...