one of the most gleefully, knowingly boneheaded albums i've ever listened to. you know these guys were absolutely CHEESING in the booth rapping about white castle and russell simmons smoking angel dust
also something crazy about how THIS was the first rap album to hit the billboard top 200, especially since it was already 2 years out from Run-DMC's debut. Whodini had two records out! but rick rubin, for all his myriad faults, knows (knew?) the business and i guess he had a hunch that what people needed was for it to be some white boys
anyway: Paul's Boutique clears
"never is a promise / and you can't afford to lie"
i can't imagine being 17 and having already experienced so much pain that you could write and record an album like this. no wonder she's such a fan of Maya Angelou — talk about kindred spirits.
this isn't a trip-hop album but it's also not NOT one. The First Taste in particular has a real sinuous-but-skittering groove to it that i can very easily imagine the Massive Attack boys laying down raspy verses over.
her voice is, of course, just perfect for these songs. she has such mastery over that weary contralto; you don't have to tax your imagination at all to envision her on stage, behind a piano, in some cigarette-choked nightclub seizing the attention of everyone present and refusing to release it, refusing to let anyone breathe.
obviously i have nothing but respect for the classic hardcore rap acts: schoolly d, krs-one, NWA et al. those guys all laid the groundwork for so much incredible art that came after them — you don't get all the rage artists around nowadays without the stuff those guys did.
but i think i'm just too much of a softie to prefer it over the sunny loverboy backpacker rap like this.
this album is really interesting because everything i've read about it post-listening seems to indicate that de la soul themselves kinda hated the response to it? they felt so hemmed-in by the response and the image that got impressed upon them after releasing it that their next record exists almost as a total rejection of that image. "the daisy age is over!" they say.
which is such a shame because man, i sure do love the daisy age. at least there were a lot of other rap acts operating in this same space. are digable planets in this thing? they better be in this thing.
not THE most sensorially overstimulating albums i've ever heard in my life but definitely pretty up there. the production on this thing is all over the fuckin place, in a way that's sometimes working in its favor and sometimes in a way that's like ok guys we get it you found a great deal on that S900
it's a little unusual that from what i've seen, the Bomb Squad don't get brought up much by people talking about the "mainstreaming" of plunderphonics. it's accepted largely as fact that DJ Shadow discovered the style fully-formed but, like... who do people think he was listening to, you know?
chuck has one of the most iconic voices and flows in all of hip-hop and flav is also there. no offense to the man, his body of work(?) speaks for itself but i definitely prefer when he's sticking to his hype man adlib stuff and not trying to rhyme.
side note: i wonder if we'd even be talking about this record at all if they hadn't kicked griff out of the band after he said all that shit. i checked his wiki article to see what he was up to these days and apparently he's making the right-wing conspiracy theory podcast circuit so rest in fuckin piss as far as i'm concerned
this is a relatively middling bowie album, which by basically all known standards still means it's like an 8/10. carlos alomar is on it, which, like... you know, say no more.
there's a lot of fun trivia about this album that i think is more interesting than the record itself.
for example: a then-unknown luther vandross is on this, and you could argue that it's the session/album that got him his big break! also: john lennon plays guitar on this record's cover of "across the universe", which unfortunately does not redeem it from being a total embarrassment, the worst song on the album, and a complete mood-killer coming off of "somebody up there likes me".
the hits on this one are SERIOUS hits, though, to a degree that almost overwhelms the sense of self-consciousness in bowie's blue-eyed soul. "can you hear me", "fascination", and especially "fame", which is such a masterpiece that george clinton and james brown ripped it off basically wholesale for two of their own singles.
i like to think that bowie was woke enough back then to feel kind of weird about being a white guy taking up all that airtime on soul train, but maybe i'm writing fanfiction there.
"OK" is right
a lot of pretty lightweight atmospheric dnb that goes right in one ear and out the other on this, but the highlights are strong. this album is at its most interesting when it's leaning hard into the use of traditional instruments, which is why i think Butterfly is THE song to listen to off this one. listen to those tablas!
ryuichi sakamoto (my goat) is also featured on this, contributing some flute parts, and apparently sent them to the studio via email from new york — waow so futuristic!
talvin singh himself seems way more interesting than this album so i might have to look more into his work. when i was reading about this i unearthed lots of fun stuff: he toured with siouxsie and the banshees, was part of massive attack's live band, he arranged the strings on bjork's debut... he's had quite a career.
do we even HAVE contemporary indie rock without this album? i'm not really sure that we do.
this is one of those records that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people, and i'm way too young to have any meaningful attachment whatsoever to what this record meant to people who first heard it going into the tail end of the vietnam war.
what this album is to ME is just a sparkling collection of beautifully melancholic california folk in the vein of (obviously) Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. he had such an unbelievable knack for melody and songcraft on this album, pretty without being schmaltzy, but still willing to get loud and a little mad when necessary.
like, damn, take a look at the lyrics to Southern Man sometime; not many other white folk guys back then willing to put a demand for slavery reparations on tape and ship it, that's for damn sure, although having a then-18-year-old Nils Lofgren's shit-kicking guitar cutting through the album's dreamy haze like a chainsaw probably helps sell that to the uncertain.
one of those albums where you immediately understand why it has the reputation it has upon listening to it, but continued listening leaves you with the impression that you could cull like 25% of the songs in the list and have possibly an even BETTER album.
it's also really funny (positive) how much stuff there is on this record that just is not punk music at all. they were doing fuckin' whatever! 2 years after their debut and they were already seemingly bored with being a punk band. i respect that i think
