scaryblog

Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time... #106 : Live Through This - Hole (1994)   One week before Hole’s breakthrough album was released, Kurt Cobain killed himself and made Courtney Love a widow. The media attention that followed guaranteed a close listen for Love’s fearsome songs and her shift from pure riot-grrrl punk to a more stable sound that MTV could embrace. Her coded songs have dark topics, including death (“Kill me pills”), violence (“Pee girl gets the belt”), and body shame (“Bad skin, doll heart”), as well as motherhood. (Cobain and Love became parents two years earlier, and briefly lost custody after she was reported to have used heroin while pregnant.) The horror in Love’s exposed voice on “Asking for It” and “Doll Parts” gives immediacy to her firsthand stories about being an outcast “pee girl.” Ah, Courtney.  You've certainly lived an "interesting" life, haven't you?  Not one I would have opted for and y...

Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time... #109 : Transformer - Lou Reed (1973)   David Bowie counted the former Velvet Underground leader as a major inspiration — and paid back the debt by producing Transformer. The album had glam flash courtesy of Ziggy Stardust guitarist Mick Ronson as well as Reed’s biggest hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” — which brought drag queens and hustlers into the Top 20 — and the exquisite ballad “Perfect Day.” It was Reed’s first producer, VU impresario Andy Warhol, who inspired the lead cut when he suggested “Vicious” as a song title. “You know, like, ‘Vicious/You hit me with a flower,’” Warhol elaborated. Reed took him at his word, penning the song and cribbing the lines verbatim. I had heard this album back in the day and so wasn't as scared of it as I would otherwise have been.  There are at least tunes on it and whilst he's not what anyone would call the best singer ever, he conveys e...

Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time... #112 : Goodbye Yellow Brick Road - Elton John (1973)   Elton John compared this double album to the Beatles’ White Album, and why not? He was by this point the most consistent hitmaker since the Fab Four, and soon enough he would be recording with John Lennon. Everything about  Goodbye Yellow Brick Road  was supersonically huge, from the Wagnerian-opera-like combo of “Funeral for a Friend” and “Love Lies Bleeding” to the electric boots and mohair suit of “Bennie and the Jets.” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was strutting rock & roll, “Candle in the Wind” paid tribute to Marilyn Monroe (and later, Princess Diana), and the title track harnessed the fantastical imagery of glam to a Gershwin-sweet melody. Another album my Dad owned, so I must have heard it, but probably not since the year of release, so please forgive me if my memory is slightly hazy, given that I was only 5...

Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time... #115 :  good kid ,  m.A.A.d city  - Kendrick Lamar (2012)   Kendrick Lamar’s hip-hop autobiography came as a shock in 2012: musically downbeat, with a film director’s eye for narrative but the voice of a poet.  Good kid  is his story of growing up in Compton, surrounded by gunfire, gang warfare, police brutality, drugs, liquor, dead friends — billed on the cover as “A Short FIlm by Kendrick Lamar,” like a West Coast answer to Martin Scorsese’s  Mean Streets . K-Dot goes for emotional detail instead of gangsta bravado, whether cruising the streets in “Backseat Freestyle” or pondering addiction in “Swimming Pool (Drank).” As he told  Rolling Stone , “The best entertainers have to have the most wickedest sense of humor, to be able to take pain and change it into laughter.” Our second visit with Kendrick on this list and last time  I expressed bemusement at ...

Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time... #118 : Hotel California - Eagles (1978)   In pursuit of note-perfect Hollywood-cowboy ennui, the Eagles spent eight months in the studio polishing take after take after take. As Don Henley recalled: “We just locked ourselves in. We had a refrigerator, a ping-pong table, roller skates, and a couple of cots. We would go in and stay for two or three days at a time.” With guitarist Joe Walsh replacing Bernie Leadon, the band backed off from straight country rock in favor of the harder sound of “Life in the Fast Lane.” The highlight is the title track, a monument to the rock-aristocrat decadence of the day and a feast of triple-guitar interplay. “Every band has their peak,” Henley said. “That was ours.” I'm not a huge Eagles fan in general (and was very underwhelmed last time ), but any album that opens with "Hotel California", "New Kid In Town" and "Life In The Fast Lane...