How does it feel to be without a home?
Continuing my trip up Rolling Stone's list of the 500 Greatest Albums Of All Time...
...I've listened to Kendrick's offering a couple of times in an attempt to understand the much-acclaimed genius (but I've not found it yet) and I've never listened to Bob's offering, but I'm pretty certain I'm not going to find the much-acclaimed genius there, either. As to who's going to win the round, I have absolutely no idea.
#19 : To Pimp A Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar (2015)
Kendrick Lamar had already proven himself hip-hop’s boldest visionary — so by now, people expected greatness from him. But he topped himself with To Pimp a Butterfly — a sprawling, ambitious portrait of America and his dangerous place in it, with a host of jazz influences. “It’s a unique sound,” said longtime Lamar producer Mark “Sounwave” Spears. “Every producer I’ve ever met was sending me stuff [for the album], but there was a one-in-a-million chance you could send a beat that actually fit what we were doing.”
As Lamar said when the album was released, “I pride myself on writing now rather than rapping. My passion is bringing storylines around and constructing a full body of work, rather than just a 16-bar verse.”“Alright” became a Black Lives Matter anthem, with “The Blacker the Berry” as the flip side. “How Much a Dollar Cost” is a haunting meditation on mortality, set to a Radiohead piano loop. And in “King Kunta,” K-Dot takes in the whole sweep of African American heartbreak, from the Middle Passage to the hood, from Richard Pryor to P-Funk. “You take a black kid out of Compton and put him in the limelight, and you find answers about yourself you never knew you were searching for,” Lamar said. “There’s some stuff in there, man. It’s a roller coaster. It builds.”
So, as I previously mentioned, I have listened to this album a few times because it is widely regarded as being touched by genius and so I checked it out, but had never managed to get to a place where I understood said genius, so was interested to try again. And whilst I'm certainly not there yet, I do feel I'm getting closer. A lot of the problem with trying to write about this album is that there is so much in there - to describe it as a hip-hop album doesn't even begin to get close to what's on there. Along with the hip-hop, there's a heady combination of jazz, funk, R&B and poetry all blended together with a great deal of thought and intelligence.
Part of me is tempted to try a track-by-track breakdown, but I suspect everyone would get a bit bored with me saying "I'm not entirely sure what's going on here" - "King Kunta", "i" and "How Much A Dollar Cost" jumped out at me, but there is also some absolutely incredible vocal delivery on "For Free?". I do get the impression that a lot of the album is bound up with "the African-American experience", which is obviously ridiculously oversimplifying matters but it's really not something I can (or should) claim to relate to. But overall, there are a lot of interesting noises on there and I think it's worth checking out - I will attempt to stick with it over the years and see if I make any progress with it.
Wikipedia takes the opposite approach to me and my oversimplification and seemingly lists every possible theme involved on the album - in my opinion that doesn't really help either. There were a LOT of people involved in the album including George Clinton, Thundercat, Snoop, Pharell, Dre, SZA and a million other people I've never heard of. It was exceptionally well received by the critics - they absolutely loved it and still do. The sales figures feel low compared to some other albums we've seen on this list, but this has the disadvantage of being a later release where streaming somewhat complicates such matters.
I was interested in the explanation of the album title "The album was originally going to be titled Tu Pimp a Caterpillar, a backronym for Tu.P.A.C., itself an allusion to the rapper Tupac" - after all, who doesn't love a backronym? Apparently it was changed just because he preferred the contrast between the words "pimp" and "butterfly" - and it's his album, so he can do what he likes. And this included "The album's CD release included a booklet produced with braille letterings; according to Lamar, these characters when translated reveal the "actual full title of the album."" - apparently it translated to A Kendrick by Letter Blank Lamar, so I hope that clears that up.
His Wikipedia entry is very long and last time I promised I'd make an effort to read it. And, what can I say, I made an effort. And I hope you're happy with that, because that's all you're getting - it's not the best structured effort out there (although it does have a nice smiley picture of him, which makes a nice change from some of his contemporaries). "Customers also listened to" Childish and Chance - some of the more intelligent hip-hoppers out there (who I've generally completely avoided).
So this was our third and final visit with Kendrick and generally my opinion has been "I don't get it" - I feel this album comes closest to providing some kind of comprehension, but I suspect I'm just not really the intended audience and if I claimed to understand it, there would be complaints. But there are some fascinating sounds and a lot of intelligence and thought involved so I recommend checking it out - it certainly doesn't get thrown in the "generic hip-hop" bin.
#18 : Highway 61 Revisited - Bob Dylan (1965)
Bruce Springsteen has described the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, as the “snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your mind.” In and of itself, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was rumored to be about Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, forever altered the landscape of popular music — its “vomitific” lyrics (in Dylan’s memorable term), literary ambition, and sheer length (6:13) shattered limitations of every kind. But that was literally only the beginning.
The rest of the album, recorded in a shocking six days, was just as revelatory. If anyone questioned whether or not Dylan had truly “gone electric,” the roaring rock & roll of “From a Buick 6” and “Tombstone Blues” — both powered by legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — left no doubt. The album ends with “Desolation Row,” a swirling 11-minute surrealist night journey of indescribable power, a Hieronymus Bosch-like season in hell that, in retrospect, seems to foretell all the Sixties cataclysms to come. Not that Dylan wasn’t having fun all the while as well. The toy siren that opens the album’s title track was keyboardist’s Al Kooper’s playful way of policing the recording sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. “If anybody started using drugs anywhere,” he explained, “I’d walk into the opposite corner of the room and just go whooooooooo.”
Fifty years before Kendrick was delivering his verdict on the state of things, Bob Dylan also had a few things to say on the matter. I was aware of "Like A Rolling Stone" and, despite my previous slightly derogatory comments on Bob's voice, use of harmonica and lengthy songs (all of which very much apply to this track), I quite like it. Just don't ask me why. The rest of it, I'd never heard but I had reasonably hopes for it - there's got to be something on it to warrant a top 20 position, surely?
And, yeah - I found myself quite liking a lot of it, although I found myself wondering what a lot of it meant. The lyrics generally sound meaningful but cryptic - he likes to refer to characters in such a way that you suspect they know exactly who he's talking about, but a lot of it passed me by, I'm afraid. "Like A Rolling Stone" stood out as the best track for me, but that's quite possibly because I knew it - I liked "Tombstone Blues" and the title track as well but do think I could enjoy most of them, despite the presence of Dylan's voice and a lot of harmonica. I even found the 11 minutes of "Desolation Row" to be bearable - what is going on with me today?!?
Wikipedia gives the album an incredibly lengthy track-by-track breakdown but, apart from that, doesn't have an awful lot to say about the album, which somewhat surprised me. It sounds like the critics were somewhat bemused at the time - "Bob Dylan's sixth LP, like all others, is fairly incomprehensible but nevertheless an absolute knock-out" - but over time, everyone accepts it's genius and where the 60s started, apparently. He has played a lot of the songs at many of his concerts over the years - he reckons he's played "Like A Rolling Stone" over 2000 times! It's also interesting to note that, with the exception of the title track, the album was entirely recorded over a week - he doesn't like to hang about.
I don't feel the need to revisit his Wikipedia page - we've still got one more entry of his on the list, after all. "Customers also listened to" all them 60s names - but I was pleased to find myself enjoying this a lot more than a lot of his contemporaries and considerably more than most of his entries on the list so far.
So, whilst there's isn't a lot that these albums obviously share at first listen there are definite common themes - both presenting their own view of "the American experience", both featuring dense lyrics, both pushing musically boundaries and both most definitely deserving more listens than I've managed to give them so far. And one more thing they have in common is that they're tied winners of this round, because I really can't think of a way to separate them.
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