It’s fair to say that the world underwent some massive changes in 1991 that my teenage brain was blissfully unaware of at the time. More countries gained independence that year than any other during my lifetime so far, and the part of me that was obsessed with maps took that as an opportunity to learn a bunch of “new” countries and capitals, but there was no way I could have grasped what the fallout from the gradual dissolution of Yugoslavia and the more abrupt end of the Soviet Union meant geopolitically. I had been too young in the 80s to understand the tension that the world existed in during the Cold War, and I honestly wasn’t attentive enough in history class as a high school freshman for it to mean much to me when teachers tried to cover it. Closer to home, there was a cultural shift going on in popular music that I wasn’t totally attuned to at the time, with alternative rock and grunge (I didn’t yet understand that these terms weren’t 100% interchangeable) starting to take over the airwaves. It impacted how young folks expressed themselves in terms of fashion – the glitzy excesses of the 80s were out, and flannel was in, making it one of those rare moments when I was accidentally fashionable with my second-hand thrift store clothing bought by necessity, not as a conscious stylistic choice. Hip-hop and R&B were having a moment, too, which was a scene I was even further removed from, but I do remember thinking it was cool how all the sampling and drum loops that came from those neighborhoods of the music world had started to leave fingerprints on everything from mainstream pop to some of that edgy alternative rock the cool kids were into. Whether it was outdated national borders or musical genres that I had been previously led to believe didn’t play nice with each other, it felt like an old system was breaking down and a new world order was starting to take its place.
Continue readingjoni mitchell
The Fabbest Albums of the 60s, Part V: 1-10
Finally reaching the pinnacle of this series on my favorite albums of the 1960s means I’ve reached the close of not just a chapter, not just a volume, but what feels like an entire shelf’s worth of books. There was a time in my life not all that long ago when I only really put effort into listening to music that was new to me if it was reasonably current. I had this vague idea that I would someday go back and “respect the classics” when I found myself with a copious amount of free time, but I wasn’t exactly in a hurry to make it a priority. Then 2020 happened, and that wish for “copious free time” was granted in one of the worst ways possible, and I figured I might as well make the best of it and spend some quality time revisiting the music of the 2000s. What started as a hobby to fill time became a borderline obsession with going further and further back through the music of previous decades, even as we emerged from those dark days of isolation and daily life resumed something resembling its normal patterns. I wasn’t sure at times if I’d stick with it at the pace of one entire decade’s worth of music per year, but I knew that the 60s were as far back as I could logically go with it, at least with my album-based approach. And now I’m kind of stunned that I’ve actually made it back this far and completed this crazy multi-year mission I dreamed up for myself, because there are few things in life that I stick to with that level of devotion for that long. Truthfully, I’m downright exhausted – trying to summarize some of these classic albums that I’ve come to love so dearly in a relatively short period of time has only become a more daunting task the farther back in time I’ve gone! – and I’m excited to dream up a new approach to exploring the past in a less rigorous “try to consume as much of it as I can at once” sort of manner. There’s still an entire library’s worth of music to explore beyond my little shelf, of course – but there’s also a part of me that wants to pull some of those favorites that I’ve already found off of the shelf and enjoy them again, and spend some time back on more familiar ground and find a different way to write about that experience, while still being open to new discoveries along the way. I’m still trying to figure out what shape that’s going to take.
All of this is to say, this’ll probably be the last time I attempt one of these “decade binges” until we’re knocking on the door of 2030 and I can start thinking about how to rank my favorite albums of the 2020s, and hopefully find some great ones that I missed as well. For now, please enjoy this final entry counting down my Top 10 albums of the 1960s, which is gonna hit some really obvious highlights, but also hopefully throw a few curveballs along the way.
Continue readingThe Fabbest Albums of the 60s, Part IV: 11-20
Engaging with the music of the 1960s as an adult has been interesting, as I’ve started to move beyond seeing it just as an aesthetic representation of both the turmoil of that decade and the hope that all of this social change would result in a better society, and I’ve started thinking about it a lot more in terms of what it meant for popular music as art, not just as entertainment. Not that we didn’t already have a long history before that of artists revolting against the expectations of whoever was funding their work and creating music that sought to challenge an audience just looking to have a good time, but I feel like the album becoming the dominant form for music releases in the 60s gave artists a lot of agency that they didn’t previously have, to really establish an identity and invite listeners to get to know them beyond the singles that only allowed us to spend a brief amount of time with them and that were generally geared towards more immediate appeal. That didn’t happen right away, of course – the pressure to fill out this newly invented format with 30-40 minutes of new music often left an artist scrambling to cobble together whatever tunes they were covering in their live gigs plus whatever the hired-gun songwriters brought in by the label were providing for them. And there was pressure to churn out at least two of those collections a year, even a third in some cases, in the midst of near-constant touring. It’s no wonder certain artists revolted, using their newfound fame as leverage to say “we don’t want to deal with the constant grind of life on the road and get stalked by obsessive fans” or “we want to take longer in the studio and push the boundaries of our genre and get really involved in the recording process instead of just showing up and singing.” The notion of the performing artist as the main creative force behind the compositions they were recording really emerged in the 60s, and we saw an interesting shift from the popular songs of the day getting covered over and over again (though this wasn’t always a bad thing as it gave some emerging songwriters a great deal of exposure) to the expectation that an album would be a concentrated dose of self-expression, with any cover choices intended to enhance the overall mood or theme instead of just feeling like they were randomly tacked on. Pretty much all of the things I took for granted about how albums should be structured, what the intent of putting them out was, and what made them most likely to succeed as unified artistic statements, came from all the trial and error and pushing back against labels and music industry bosses on the battlefield of creative control in the 1960s. Not every album that I love from this era fits that ideal, of course – the way things should be was still being hashed out, and there’s something to be said for a natural born entertainer crooning their way through a delightful jukebox of song selections while someone else worries about all the little sonic details. But it’s an era in which both the commercial and the counter-cultural sounds of the day excite me a whole lot – and honestly, that’s more than I can say for some of the decades I’ve lived through.
Continue readingJoni Mitchell – Ladies of the Canyon: We got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Artist: Joni Mitchell
Album: Ladies of the Canyon
Year: 1970
Grade: A-
In Brief: Ladies of the Canyon was a pivotal moment not just for Joni Mitchell, but for late 60s/early 70s folk/rock in general, serving almost as a time capsule of the whole culture surrounding a cluster of artists living in their idyllic Southern California enclave. Clouds might have been the album to put her on the map, and Blue is often cited as her all-time best, but between those two came a record that I think best synthesizes Joni’s talents as a songwriter, an entertainer, and a versatile musician. This is where she hit the “sweet spot” that made her music the most approachable for a newbie like me more than half a century later.
Continue readingThe Grooviest Albums of the 70s, Part IV: 1-20
We’re reaching the grand finale of my list… and the color schemes are getting increasingly garish to compensate. Now that I’m wrapping up this year-long project, and now that I’ve recapped my relationship to the music of the 70s as I was growing up, one big question that’s left for me to answer is: How do I relate to the music of the 70s here and now in the 2020s, with half a century of water under the bridge? Honestly, a lot better than I thought I would. For all of my gratitude toward some of this decade’s most influential artists who I already knew had shaped the young minds and careers of some of my present-day favorites, I was actually a bit apprehensive about going back to the source and hearing some of these groundbreaking artists in their more primitive forms. Going further back in time meant stripping away a lot of the building blocks that I take for granted in modern music – synthpop was only just starting to become a thing at the end of the 70s, alternative and indie music were but a glimmer in the eye of some young stalwarts with the means and determination to buck the system, and the entire practice of putting together an album seemed more arduous, often resulting in shorter run times due to the necessity of fitting the LP format. A part of me was worried that this would be more of a history lesson than a chance to genuinely fall in love with a bunch of classic albums like I had upon revisiting the 80s and 90s.
Thankfully, I was way wrong. The 70s certainly had its share of guilty pleasures, but also its surprising moments where I almost forgot I was listening to music that had been around longer than I had. Classic radio hits I’d been exposed to so many times that I thought I couldn’t glean anything new from them hit me differently on many of these albums. More exploratory artists I knew less about sounded out of step with their own era, to the point where I was surprised it took musicians from later decades so darn long to catch on and follow their lead. The biggest test was how comfortable I felt sharing a lot of this music with my family during car trips or game nights at home – I figured I might get a bit of needling for going so deep into all of these obviously dated-sounding records that my wife only barely recalled snippets of from her own childhood, but instead it led to discussions about how a lot of this music shaped our parents’ sensibilities when they were young, and how it filtered into the music of the 80s when we were impressionable little kids. Heck, even my eight-year-old daughter got in on the conversation when she picked up on a reference to a 70s band in some kid-friendly time travel show she was watching on her tablet and ask, “Dad, have you heard of ____?”, and I’d get to share a fun little snippet of music history that I myself had just recently learned. I think I’ve finally gotten over “awkward embarrassment” being my instinctual first response to any mention of the 70s and the aspects of that decade that I happen to be fond of. Pop culture seems to have given it a similar re-assessment over the years, and for once I feel like I’m in agreement with the zeitgeist on this one.
At the same time, don’t confuse the warm glow of my nostalgia for a decade I didn’t live through (those last two years notwithstanding) for a wish that I could actually go back and exist in that time. Sure, I’d have enjoyed the music, but I doubt I’d have survived the fashions! More crucially, the social and economic upheaval of that decade would have been tough to go through – the Vietnam War, Watergate, gas rationing, all that crazy stuff. (The 2020s are shaping up to be an even crazier decade for the history books, but that’s another story.) Honestly, a lack of internet access and being limited to the radio and word of mouth would have probably walled me off from a lot of the great music that came from African-American culture, or from overseas, aside from the very biggest acts who were able to bust through those artificial walls and appeal to the music-buying populace at large. And while every decade has its tragic deaths as promising young artists succumb to the demands and temptations of the rockstar lifestyle, the 70s seemed especially rife with earth-shattering losses that took some of the brightest and best minds in music away from us far too soon, which I imagine would have been tough to deal with in real time. I was definitely better off exploring the 70s in hindsight, with all the modern tools available to me to research the history behind the albums I listened to and the mindsets of the people who made them, and the many friends who gave recommendations via social media.
I thought it would be interesting to break down what years all the albums that made my Top 80 for this decade were originally released. So, here are the stats:
1970: 9
1971: 8
1972: 10
1973: 11
1974: 7
1975: 7
1976: 9
1977: 7
1978: 5
1979: 7
Interestingly, even though I thought I’d have an easier time relating to the early 70s because I started there and expected it to somewhat resemble the early 80s, more of the albums that I ended up really cherishing came out in the early 70s, still very early on in the lifecycle of “the album era”. 1972 and 1973 were the big winners – I swear, something must have been in the water that led to a flurry of creative activity in those years that pushed modern music forward by leaps and bounds. I’m a little dismayed by the poor showing of 1978 – come on, people, that’s when I was born, you all should have represented better that year!
Well anyway, enough of this nerdy analysis, I know what you’re really here for. Behold, the 20 albums that I think best represent the legacy that the music of the 70s left behind for us.
Continue readingThe Grooviest Albums of the 70s, Part III: 21-40
When did nostalgia for the 70s really start to take hold? According to a quick Google, it seems to be some time around the very late 90s or early 2000s, when we started seeing a lot more movies and TV shows set in that era, and hearing more covers of 70s songs on the radio that put a modern spin on some of those kitschy old hits. Those were my college and young adult years, and aside from what was going on in popular culture, I feel like I had a fair number of experiences where I’d be hanging out in someone’s dorm room and they’d put some old records on while we talked late into the night, and even if I only have vague memories of what I actually heard on those records, I thought there was something cool about someone in my generation being willing to dig back into the music of yesteryear, from a time before they were born. No illicit substances were smoked or imbibed during those listening sessions – well, not by me anyway – but if a record could take a friend away to a special place in their mind, then I wanted to at least understand a little bit of what made that happen for them. Put on some of the more expansive and experimental psychedelic or progressive rock records from that era (I seem to recall several Pink Floyd albums being in the rotation), or even some of the more earnest folk records, and it becomes an ideal backdrop for a college kid on the cusp of learning how to fend for himself in life to start pondering the big existential questions. (Bob Marley was omnipresent too – not so much my thing, but I think some of my friends were into him for genuinely non-bandwagon-y reasons.) I may have still only been collecting modern music from my religious subculture at the time, but those early mind-opening experiences really took root – they’re the reason I sought out such an eclectic list of 70s artists all these years later.
Probably the most specific incident that led me to better appreciate 70s music was in 2001, when a friend I had met online (still kind of a scary prospect at that time) started to teach me how to play guitar. I had met this friend on a dating site, but we never actually dated – we connected on a purely platonic wavelength, and we both loved music to the point of obsession. 70s soft rock was her specialty – Eagles, America, Poco, Firefall, stuff like that. We’d pull up chord sheets for some of those songs (or just sit by the stereo and try to figure them out for ourselves), marvel at how the subtlest shift away from a standard chord voicing could add so much flavor to a song, and of course soak in some of the rich vocal harmonies that artists of that persuasion tended to have. It massively brightened up a rather rough patch in my life, helping me to make it through the lonely gap between a rough breakup and meeting the woman who would become my wife the following year. Armed with my acoustic guitar, I figured it couldn’t hurt to have a few romantic songs in my arsenal to help win her heart. My soft rock-loving friend and I liked to conspire together about how we would use music to woo potential future mates; it was great when we each individually got the chance to put that plan into action.
With that little walk down memory lane out of the way, let’s get going with the upper half of the list! This section is where we really start to turn a corner from the fun, but flawed albums, the oddities that I genuinely liked but find it a bit tricky to defend, and the landmark albums heralded by others that I enjoyed but with some hesitation, to the stuff that I was able to pretty effortlessly recognize as classic after the first few listens.
Continue readingThe Grooviest Albums of the 70s, Part II: 41-60
I started off each segment of my 80s and 90s lists with little vignettes about how I related to the music from those decades at different stages in my life, so I thought it’d be interesting to do something similar for the 70s as well. As previously mentioned, I wasn’t even alive for the first eight years of this decade, so I have no memories of this music to share with you that are actually from the 70s. My first impressions of this era – its music, its trends, its fashions, its slang – all come from the 80s, when we as a society started to get far enough out from the 70s to look back on it with an odd combination of nostalgia and regret.
The biggest example of this that comes to mind is how I learned pretty early on that disco was a thing to be ridiculed – my mom had always hated it, comparing the ever-present drum beat to the thumping of a washing machine, and mass culture (at least here in America) had pretty soundly rejected it at the tail end of the 70s. So if disco was ever referenced, it was always the butt of jokes, as were many of the fashion and design choices of the era. (We had no idea what was coming for us as we embraced all of those garish 80s trends that we thought looked way more cool and sophisticated.) All of the rock & roll from that era was about drugs, drugs, drugs, as far as I was taught, so I had relatively little exposure to any of that stuff, aside from when I would visit with my uncles and they’d put their favorite classic rock station on while we played chess or whatever. I had no real exposure to a lot of the R&B, soul, and funk music of that era (and thus no knowledge of its influence on the development of rock music) – I don’t ever recall hearing any open disdain for it, but somewhere along the way I got the erroneous impression that Black folks listened to certain kinds of music and white folks listened to certain other kinds of music, and that was all fine and we just quietly respected those boundaries. Contemporary Christian music was in its infancy in the 70s, and I wouldn’t even know it was a thing until the 90s. So that mainly left folk music as the only real exposure I had to the popular music of the 70s at home, notwithstanding whatever stray hits from yesteryear I caught wind of on TV or some radio station my parents had on in the background – and I wouldn’t have known as a kid how new or old those songs were. I actually had a conversation with my mom about this recently, remembering that my parents had a pretty decent sized collection of records in the house, so there must have been something that two reasonably young adults at the time must have been into that was contemporary, and that was basically her answer where the 70s were concerned – lots of folk music. And that may have planted some developmental seeds in terms of my appreciation for a singer/songwriter sitting on a stool with a simple instrument, just trying to tell an honest story, and especially for a group of such singers who knew how to lock into a good harmony with one another. Still, it wasn’t until late high school and well into college that I even knew the names of a lot of the most popular artists of the 70s, much less what they actually sounded like or how they influenced any of the music I started to get into when my own journey as a music junkie began in the 90s. Even then, nostalgia for the 80s was way stronger at that point, at least among the people around me – the 70s were just an unusual footnote, a lost era that we had to admit moved us forward in a lot of ways but that we were also kind of embarrassed to look back on. I had to get to a point where I could sort out what appealed to me from what I was supposed to think was uncool before I could really start to develop an interest in 70s music on my own. (And we’ll get to that in the next chapter.)
Continue readingThe Grooviest Albums of the 70s, Part I: 61-80
What comes to your mind when you think about the music of the 70s? Disco dancers wearing bell-bottom jeans? Protest rockers smashing their guitars while raging against warmongering governments? Folk singers with heavenly harmonies? Funk and soul outfits with huge hairdos and tight horn sections? Mellow yacht rockers inviting us to sail away into their escapist fantasies? Hippies with long, flowing hair and cool moustaches living eternally transient lifestyles out on the wide open road in their colorful VW buses? All of these 70s stereotypes and MORE can be yours for the low, low price of… Nah, I’m just kidding. I’m not here to do a cheesy infomercial for one of those K-tel compilations. But I am here to investigate and to challenge a lot of those stereotypes that have been rattling around in my head since my youth. I’ve spent the entire last year on the latest in my string of “decade binges”, this time focusing on music released between 1970 and 1979. And now I’m going to attempt to share my thoughts on the albums that I had the most positive impressions of after giving myself a crash course in what the music of this era was really like.
In previous years, when I did similar projects spanning the 1980s and 1990s, I opened with some sort of commentary on what my relationship to the music was like when it was still new, versus how my perception of the music from those decades changed as I got older. The 1970s presented a whole new challenge to me – I was born in 1978 and, owing to the fact that I was just shy of my second birthday when the decade ended, I genuinely don’t remember any of this stuff from when it was new. And with one very niche exception, I had not listened to a single album from the 70s from end to end until I started this project last year. Which means I’m now about half a century removed from the cultural and historical context that gave rise to all of this music being made. Research can only tell me so much – there’s simply no way I could have the same reaction to some of this stuff than folks who were there to live it in real-time, or even folks who weren’t sheltered like I was and who grew up with a lot of this music as a regular fixture of their formative years. I’m mostly going to be giving hot takes on how I’m responding to these records based on music I love that I can tell they influenced, or maybe in some cases the faint echoes of memories I have of certain songs from my younger years. There are going to be stone-cold classics that I totally overlooked, and there are going to be underdog albums that were poorly reviewed and that sold terribly that you just won’t believe I ranked above greater-known works by the very same artists. All of this is just the opinion of a relative newbie trying to better understand the origins of a lot of his present-day musical tastes. You’re gonna want to take some of this with a massive heaping tablespoon of salt.
Before I get started, a quick note on my methodology: There was no dang way that I was gonna be able to listen to absolutely everything that I thought might be worth giving a try, even with an entire year to devote to this project. So I took a similar approach to how I handled other decades – I compiled a list of artists from the era who interested me, went into Spotify, saved each of their albums into separate folders for each year, then went through those years one by one and singled out roughly 30 albums per year that I wanted to prioritize. Every month from February through November, I devoted to a single year. As I got through that initial stack of records each month, to the point where I felt like I had a good handle on which ones were likely candidates for my list, I spent any extra time I had left on any “second string” picks from the same year that seemed like long shots, but that I figured might still be worth giving a try. The 70s, as it turned out, were notorious for having incredibly short gaps between releases for a lot of its most popular artists – labels were just hounding these guys to crank out one new project after the next, so an album a year or even sometimes two albums in the same year wasn’t unheard of. You can’t help but have a lot of filler when you generate such a huge discography that quickly – but this also proved to be a particularly ripe field for lesser-known, underdog albums that struck a chord with me even though in some cases I went in not having previously heard a single song. It’s also worth noting that I worked my way backwards through the decade instead of forwards – starting with 1979 and ending at 1970. I learned the hard way from revisiting the 2010s and the 2000s, and then taking what for the most part was a first trip through the 1990s and then the 1980s in chronological order, that it was really jarring to finish up one decade and then suddenly leap back in time about 20 years to the start of the previous decade. I actually took an entire “Gap Year” away from doing these decade binges to sort of reset my expectations and give myself some time to breathe. I figured that when I kicked this project off with 1979, it would pretty closely resemble what I remembered from the very beginning of my 80s binge, and that would make the transition more smooth as I worked my way back through the 70s. There might be some cases where this led me to be biased toward later releases that were my first encounter with a particular artist – but then there are also some cases where I’ve been advised, “This artist’s later stuff is dodgy; start with the early 70s and then circle back if you like them enough to dive deeper”, and I think my willingness to be flexible paid off. Point is, I didn’t encounter most of this music in anything resembling the order that a person who lived through the 70s in their entirety would’ve. So it took a little extra effort in some cases to understand the backdrop of what was going on in terms of social change and politics and whatnot when these songs were first hitting the ears of new listeners.
All in all, this is probably the most work I’ve put into any of these decade binges so far, in terms of the sheer number of albums that were new to me that I tried to process – probably upwards of 400, just to give a rough estimate. When I did my 80s binge, I chose to showcase my Top 80 picks from that exercise, and I’m going to do 80 again here, mostly because it’s a nice neat multiple of 20, and I really felt like that upper tier where I was genuinely excited about an album versus merely liking portions of it cut off somewhere around there – I didn’t want to force myself to write about 100 albums when I would have been more reserved about the bottom 20 or so from that list. There’s definitely room for this list to grow as my tastes continue to change over time and I discover that there’s more historical context I want to go back and absorb from artists who maybe weren’t even on my radar this time around. But for now, I’ve gotta start somewhere – so here’s the first installment of a gargantuan writing assignment that’s definitely gonna take most of January for me to finish.
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