Prince: Prince (1979)

So much of Prince's eponymous sophomore effort can be summarized by its hysterical cover. Where For You functioned as primarily a disco record, Prince fit more into the funk mold. The move from a hot and current genre to the (relatively) old-fashioned sound that helped spawned it is matched by the change from For You's blurry, flashy cover to the almost-pastel colored photograph that adorns Prince. Featuring a visibly bored Prince standing with his shirt off, the album art suggests Prince at once in his own skin (figuratively stripped down from disco to funk and literally stripped down to a bare chest) and uncomfortably and artificially donning an image in the fierce hunt for success.

That contradiction holds back Prince's second LP, but the fact that Prince is at least somewhat at home with the material marks a step up from his debut. It still sounds more like For You than Dirty Mind, but Prince shows its maker starting to consolidate his early sound into something more focused, capable of setting trends instead of merely following them. Hell, even as Prince starts to distance itself from disco, it does disco better than For You, managing to give even single-length numbers the elasticity and bounce of extended dance mixes and just having groove in the first place, an element sorely lacking from so much of the first album.

Prince: For You (1978)

Before Prince Rogers Nelson turned 20 years old, he cut his teeth in a funk group where he soon eclipsed peer and mentor alike, got himself an astonishingly generous record deal from a major label (including publishing rights for all his work), and released his solo debut with the proud boast of having been entirely "produced, arranged, composed and performed" by its maker. Never mind the misleading half-truths of that claim: For You's artistic credit sent a message of intent and announced a musician of ambition and creative drive. Indeed, Prince may well have been less satisfied with the impressiveness of his accomplishments at such a young age than he was irritated by the two interminable years it took to turn his demo into a full-fledged, official product.

Adding to the sense of For You as more an announcement of what was to come, the opening title track unfurls as a layered a cappella choir of Prince's cooing vocals soothingly telling the listener, "All of this and more is for you./With love, sincerity, and deepest care,/My life with you I share." To call this a precursor to Prince's musical openness would be inaccurate, as even at his most soulful and vulnerable, Prince throws up emotional walls to shield himself. Nevertheless, its quasi-spiritual overtones, especially when juxtaposed with the sex-drenched disco that dominates the rest of the record, offer an insight into dialectical forces that would soon propel Prince to superstardom.

Opeth: Blackwater Park/Deliverance/Damnation

I reviewed some reissues of Swedish progressive death metal band Opeth's early 2000s output for Spectrum Culture. I've been an admirer of Opeth for a while, though it's been years since I've listened to these three albums (I prefer the LPs that bookend them), but I still love Opeth's approach to prog rock, favoring atmosphere and mood over mere virtuosity. I was surprised at how much more I enjoyed Damnation this time around, finding it to be more of a gimmick back when I listened as a teenager. It may even be my third favorite Opeth album now after Ghost Reveries and Still Life.

My full piece on these reissues is up now at Spectrum Culture.

The Fall: Rough Trades and Kameraderie (1980-1983)

Previous Fall posts:

The Early Years (1976-1980)

As I noted in my last post, The Fall marked the '80s by switching labels from Step Forward to Rough Trade Records. Originating from a record shop opened in 1976 in Notting Hill that stocked ethnic artists as well as punk up-and-comers, Rough Trade turned the bosses' almost communistic ethos to distribution, resulting in one of the most legendary of early independent labels. And though the band clearly didn't suffer from executive pressures with their abrasive records for Step Forward, the thought of creative control and the slim possibility of a paycheck must have been tempting for MES and co.

But if the group's first release for the label, the live album Totale's Turns, offered an intriguing, if spotty, summary of the band's early sound, they soon moved boldly into the future. My favorite aspect of the punk era is how quickly groups matured from errantly hitting their instruments 'til noise came out to an actual sense of musicianship. Take, for but one example, the Slits. The not-quite-all-girl punk band cut two Peel sessions before they'd even made an album that are among the most rambunctious, defiantly sloppy work the BBC's engineers ever captured, then they turned up in a year's time capable of meshing reggae with punk in, frankly, more convincing fashion than The Clash. The band was already on an upward slope with the relative stabilization of the lineup, but it was at Rough Trade that The Fall as we know them today emerged.

The Fall: The Early Years (1976-1980)

The Fall is my favorite band. The ever-shifting lineup headed by Mancunian gutter prophet-poet Mark E. Smith was post-punk before punk had even flamed out and has, inexplicably, survived 35 years of Smith's brutal, unbearable behavior and an appeal that has only even risen to the level of "cult favorite" at its absolute pinnacle of popularity. Where post-punk enjoyed only a marginally longer shelf life (generally accepted to be from 1978 through 1984) than the movement that spawned it, The Fall have outlived them all. Where others are on their umpteenth reunion tour since the belated influence of the genre offered a chance to get all that cash they never received the first time out, Smith has never stopped. Then again, at least when Mission of Burma or Magazine or what have you came back it was with, generally speaking, the original members, barring those who did not live long enough to see the reunion. You could argue that The Fall lasted for less time than any of their peers, and that Smith has simply formed dozens of new groups since.

The sheer prolificacy of The Fall—at the time of this writing, the band has, officially, 29 studio albums, 35 live albums, 47 singles (many of which are non-album tracks), and 40 (mostly terrible, lazy cash-in) compilations to their name—makes them one of the most daunting groups to ever not be found in your local record shop. I was going to write something about them for my old "Stuff I Like" feature, but there's so much to cover that any one post would be embarrassingly insufficient. Instead, I'd like to go through the band's long, turbulent history in steps, highlighting each distinct phase in their ever-evolving sound, which DJ John Peel aptly described as "Always different, always the same."

The Best Albums of 2011

I'm never on top of new music at the best of times, but 2011 proved an even more pathetic year than usual, with me belatedly catching up on every recommendation I could get. Still, I did manage to hear some fantastic albums, as well as discovering more than a few talents that demanded my previously distracted attention. I was also happy to discover more jazz, as I'm always woefully behind on that front when it comes to new sounds. I can rarely write about music, so forgive me if my justifications for each album sound a bit by-the-numbers. I do greatly enjoy all of these records, though, and I hope you'll give them a spin or two.

A Life in Music

Inspired by a series I came across at YAM Magazine, I've decided to complement my A Life in Movies post with a similar journey through the music that's stood out for me each year since my birth. Of course, I never heard most of these albums until I hit my late teens, but then that was the case for the movie post too. As I did with my movies post, I will limit myself to one selection per artist to avoid simply piling on, say, Radiohead and Animal Collective albums. I've also included videos for each to give a taste of the albums I picked.

1989: King's X — Gretchen Goes to Nebraska

King's X's second album is their most overtly Christian though the band always opposed description as a Christian rock outfit; indeed, even at its most spiritual, Gretchen contains doubts and realism, transmuting its loftier moments into wistfulness rather than sermonizing faith. Also, it's about as groovy and catchy as subversively technical heavy metal gets, emphasizing Beatlesque vocal harmonies and a funky bottom that manages to sound nothing like Red Hot Chili Peppers and its clones. Doug Pinnick's soul screams on "Mission" and "Over My Head" alone will convert you. To the band, I mean. Calm down.

Charles Mingus — Cornell 1964

Long-lost jazz recordings pique my interest as much as the tease of the most infamous lost films. The frequent airing of Miles Davis' vault brings as much valuable material to me as the discovery of the lost footage in Fritz Lang's Metropolis. I would welcome a concert from Thelonious Monk with the same joy as I would those precious excised minutes from The Magnificent Ambersons. Imagine my delight, then, when Sue Mingus, Charles Mingus' widow, discovered tapes of what might have been her husband's finest band at the top of their powers. Remastered and released in full, Cornell 1964 blows previous Blue Note discoveries out of the water, including the rousing but incomplete show of John Coltrane teaming with Thelonious Monk.


Mingus' mid-'60s sextet is the source of as many live recordings as Miles' second quintet or Coltrane's quartet, both of which operated around the same time that Mingus collected his group to tour Europe. Before leaving, however, Mingus held an impromptu concert at Cornell University, a gig so secretive and spontaneous only those who were there knew about it. An ostensible warm-up gig -- the group would play their noted Town Hall concert less than three weeks later and would then depart for the much-bootlegged European tour -- the Cornell gig now stands as perhaps the definitive document of the sextet's short-lived existence.

Television — Marquee Moon

For those in the know, Tom Verlaine is the best alt.guitar soundsmith this side of Robert Quine, though those not in the know would be even less aware of ol' Quine. Picking up where Robert Fripp left off, Verlaine added sinewy, raw energy to Fripp's piercing laser lines. Amazingly, he took this style to CBGB in time for the punk explosion there and somehow stayed on the stage. He even fired the only punk among his group of actually competent musicians, Richard Hell. And yet, Television thrived during its brief lifespan, releasing just two albums and building a decades-long influence with only one of them.


Marquee Moon does not remotely sound like anything that came out of out CBGBs, including the work of Talking Heads. Mislabeled as proto-new-wave by those struggling to find some genre for the wild album, Marquee Moon is the greatest rock guitar record. to rest just outside the spotlight, neither obscure nor mainstream. It's too advanced and esoteric to ever fly as quickly to the lips of any sputtering wannabe axe-slinger as Are You Experienced? or Machine Head, but it's also too damn appealing and transporting to be ignored altogether.

By the time Verlaine made Marquee Moon, he ironed out all the wrinkles with Television, canning Hell (a move for the best for both of them), solidifying his interplay with rhythm guitarist Richard Lloyd and hammering out his poetry. Yes, his poetry. That Verlaine took his stage name from the French symbolist poet was the first indication he might not jel with the ethos and style of the Ramones. Verlaine didn't even mesh with Hell or Patti Smith, who both traded in a more gritty, streetwise brand of poetry. For where Smith and Hell used harsh rock as a backdrop for socially conscious and rebellious lyrics, Verlaine used lyrics to weave in and out of the music, as if instead of imagery and meaning Verlaine obsessed over meter.

From the opening strains of "See No Evil," his approach can be vividly heard. Vocals bend and scatter with guitar lines, chugga-chugga rhythms fall apart into peeled-off notes at mid-tempo, as if someone took a shredder, slowed him down, then placed him over a crunchy post-punk riff to see if anyone would notice. When everything snaps together for the chorus shout of "I see/I see no/EVAHLLLLLLLL" the effect is, if anything, more disorienting than when the band all seemed to be doing their own thing. What might have passed for a more accomplished brand of slop from a half-talented punk group suddenly reveals itself to be a carefully modulated effort by supremely gifted and practiced musicians.

Just as you get a handle on this, the band launches into "Venus," a warped ode with a call-and-response chorus that makes the shaking yelp of the previous track seem tame. Lilting guitar lines always sound as if leading to a solo until it becomes clear Verlaine has been soloing the entire time over his plaintive lyrics. When the backups shout "Huh?!" one sympathizes. "Friction" brings Lloyd into the fore with Verlaine, trading intervallic licks and crunching effects as Fred Smith's bass and Billy Ficca's drums hold down some semblance of a beat. Ficca and Smith are superb in their own right: Smith's bass so fluid he must have torn out his hair dealing with the average string smashing goon holding down the low end in other CBGB favorites. He meshes perfectly with Ficca, whose jazzy style navigates the winding turns of each song.

Lloyd and Verlaine's intertwining guitars, unified only when not in direct, thrilling conflict with each other, find their true outlet on the next song, the title track. A 10-minute behemoth that severed any ties still linking Television to its earlier, rawer roots, "Marquee Moon" is the culmination of Verlaine's approach to music, much as it much chagrin him. Savage and beautiful, contradictory yet whole, the song is a mounting climax, Lloyd and Verlaine thrusting and receding, pitting Lloyd's more chord-based improvisations rubbing against Verlaine's legato style. But to lump in this cascading, wild soloing with the dinosaur rock Television's contemporaries raged against would be inaccurate: this is a whole other style of rock, one that incorporates jazz without being fusion (which came with its own host of lumbering, masturbatory musicians). As much as Verlaine might be the mastermind, the others are not there merely to back him up, and a degree of understanding and intuition exists between them one normally expects only from a jazz combo. It makes even their most drawn-out noodling thrilling, something to be taken in for more than mere admiration of musical chops. The solos here are alive, vivacious and emotionally engaging as well as jaw-dropping in a "how the hell did they do this?" kind of way.

Anyone else would have ended the album with such a show-stopper, yet Television regroups for a whole other side of material, all of which holds its own against the preceding leviathan. "Elevation" sports such a beautiful riff I find myself almost wishing it remained a simple tune just so I could hear it more, but Verlaine and Lloyd by now are emboldened; they used the title track to prove their mettle, freeing them to explore full-time. The rest of the cuts demonstrate the same degree of exploration as seen in the side-one closer at shorter lengths, cramming jams into manageable chunks. "Guiding Light," with its lilting melody, could have worked as an off-kilter slow dance tune, but even Verlaine's softer pleads have their witticisms -- I always get a kick out of "Never the rose without the prick."

The album closes with "Torn Curtain," a song that appropriately tears down the veil. Staccato lyrics flit around clanged chords and broken choruses. Everything falls apart, then it comes together just long enough to prove to everyone that the crumbling is a planned detonation before breaking down again. Still, even the mild insecurity of this double-check cannot hinder the raw energy of the song, its broken windchime-like jangles doing as much to pave the way for atmospheric post-punk as the two Joy Division albums a few years down the pipeline.

Marquee Moon exploded among the critical community in 1977, placing third in the Pazz & Jop poll and building mountains of hype the band could never hope to match. Their live shows were clear expansions of the rapport the band shared in the studio, long songs growing into longer ones (but still coherent and focused, in the band's singularly unfocused way), and the punks who might have tolerated Television in the studio found little use in their live act. Johnny Rotten himself, a not-so-closeted art rock lover, reversed his complimentary appraisal of them after seeing Television live and understanding he could not protect his punk cred unless he threw Verlaine under a bus.

When the group returned to the studio to record the follow-up, the wonderful Adventure, the pressure had taken its toll. Though Adventure is more than a worthy successor, it received and continues to be received indifferently by many for the terrible sin of not being as revolutionary as Marquee Moon. Few albums are. Even today, the guitar work of Verlaine and Lloyd defies easy description, and Verlaine's scattershot poetry holds up a great deal better than many of the supposed rock bards. Television broke up shortly after the release of their second album, and Verlaine went on to enjoy a decently healthy solo career befitting a cult hero, but everything in those albums can be traced back to this one wild slice of art rock outside any genre. Verlaine's name has faded from the minds of many, but I can't understand it. One listen to Marquee Moon and every neophyte will come away with a new guitar god. I'll take these magnificent fractals and searching melodies over Eric Clapton's tired crap any day of the week.

Captain Beefheart — Lick My Decals Off, Baby

When he died Dec. 17 at the age of 69, Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart, had not produced any music since 1982's Ice Cream for Crow. Nevertheless, his passing summoned an unlikely yet not unexpected outpouring from those who ignored him in life but found reader mileage in giving him tribute in death. Thankfully, he was not absorbed into the mainstream he shunned in the same way that his old buddy Frank Zappa was when he got induction into the Rock 'N Roll Hall of Fame months after his own passing, but once January rolls around, I bet the odd name that most had never heard before will disappear from people's lips as quickly as it appeared.

Rather than eulogize the man, which would require a knowledge of the other forms of art he produced after retiring from music that I do not possess -- though that certainly has not stopped some -- I would like to honor one of the most advanced and original artists I have ever heard with a review of my favorite album of his, one fans embrace but the critical press often relegates to the heap in favor of the legendary Trout Mask Replica. Beefheart always was the kind of guy who would never be allowed more than a single shot at recognition anyway.

Yet Trout Mask Replica's follow-up, 1970's Lick My Decals Off, Baby, takes the fractals of avant-garde brilliance from Trout and hones them. It is still, first and foremost, a work that defies easy classification, but the sound is clearer now, the compositions more coherent. The opening title track bursts out of the gate with precise guitar lines and carefully controlled percussion, a shocking harmony that Beefheart shatters with his trademark yelps and growls when he jumps in with the lines, "I wanna lick you where it's pink/In everywhere you think," and the sheer force of his weirdness instantly breaks the band, who splinter into the carefully controlled chaos that is Beefheart's specialty.

Decals brings back the bluesier influence of Safe as Milk and mixes it with the off-the-wall genre blend of Trout Mask Replica, delighting in the unleashed id but retaining a soulfulness in its fitfully recalled Chicago blues that Beefheart could always command. By vocalizing not only Howlin' Wolf's pained growls but the hideous-beautiful squawks of Ornette Coleman's saxophone, Van Vliet unites the avant-garde with the traditional and direct, and his free-associative poetry likewise blends the abstract with the articulately real.

Where some artists might couch their libidos in double entendre and innuendo that usually isn't half as clever as people think, Beefheart lays it all out there, so blunt that his explicit and graphic descriptions of lewd acts and almost medical close-ups of genitalia loop around into interpretive metaphor. On the hilariously titled "I Wanna Find Me A Woman That'll Hold My Big Toe Till I Have To Go" -- the title is so long Van Vliet barely has time to speak the words and a few other lines before the song reaches its conclusion -- Beefheart never goes beyond the stated body part but fills the mind with obscene imagery simply through the suggestive properties of his sex-mad yelps.

Yet, by and large, Lick My Decals Off, Baby does not place primary focus on sex as Trout Mask Replica did. Instead, vaguely political, highly apocalyptic imagery abounds. The "parapliers" (sic) tugging on the sky in "Bellerin' Plain" send the heavens crashing down around a locomotive engineer who pumps coke into the furnace in a futile attempt to outpace the end of days -- besides, where could he go, trapped on those rails? "Petrified Forest" hones Beefheart's lyrics for a devastating attack on the world's polluters choking the planet and its inhabitants. And nothing sums up the rapidly mounting social terrors afflicting the United States and the world at the onset of the '70s like the terrifying lines of "The Buggy Boogie Woogie": "One day I was sweepin' down by the wall/I bumped a mama spider 'n the babies begin' to fall/Off o' my broom/Now I gotta keep on sweepin' 'n sweepin'/'fore they fill the room." With all this pressure weighing down on matters, it's no wonder the good captain so often retreats into the only safe haven available to him: the birth canal of the nearest willing woman.

Van Vliet composed much of the album on the piano, which poses something of a problem as he did not know how to play the instrument. But part of the charm and purity of Beefheart's recordings was his penchant for having his band play anything and assembling something from the cacophonous results. Apocryphal stories abound regarding Van Vliet's authoritarian touch with his bandmates, the most infamous of which concern his supposedly cult-like breaking of will during the months-long rehearsal for Trout Mask Replica. Whether Van Vliet psychologically tortured his crew depends mostly on whose memoir you read, but what is unquestionable is that he took his players' musical training and unmade it, showing them how to break every rule before refashioning the shattered pieces into something that makes music.

Where the brief snippets of Trout Mask Replica represented the sound of the breaking apart, Lick My Decals Off, Baby shows off the reconstruction. Bill Harkleroad a.k.a. Zoot Horn Rollo took the tapes of Van Vliet's haphazard piano sketches and helped assemble the "I Love You, Big Dummy" loses the melody before it even begins, but it still works as a rollicking blues number that hides a danceable beat somewhere in its collapsing squeal. The instrumentals -- the best of them being "Peon" -- could be mistaken for warm-ups if the tones of the clanking, atonal instruments did not carry a passion one doesn't put into scales.

Even the philistines who would dismiss Beefheart as yet another charlatan hiding behind random noise as art could not deny that the world lost an original satirist Dec. 17. With scant lines and even less coherence, Captain Beefheart could skewer anything, from the aforementioned polluters to the re-homogenization of the post-Love Generation nuclear family ("Space-Age Couple," all condescending jabs toward those who incorporated the progressive into the reactionary). But I feel we lost so much more with this artist, whose five-octave range never sounded so expressive as it does here. Lick My Decals Off, Baby represents the apotheosis of Van Vliet's output, aligning the music to the same dynamic range as the captain's hoots, hollers, shrieks, growls, purrs and whoops while offering the best of his sexual imagery and his sociopolitical observations. Following this album, Captain Beefheart would move his Magic Band into increasingly mainstream waters until he shoved too hard and trapped them in the No Man's Land between commerce and the avant-garde where no fan treads. Van Vliet would later pull them back from the brink with his last three albums, all of them magnificent, but they all lacked the spark contained in these early albums. With Lick My Decals Off, Baby, Captain Beefheart said all he could say, and that just so happened to be more than anyone else to come along in the intervening four decades.

The Top 15 Albums of 2010

Though I didn't listen to nearly as many albums this year as I do normally, I still managed to find a number of impressive works by various groups, many of which I'd never heard before. I don't know enough about music and musical trends to break down the musical landscape of the year in the way I do film, but here at least are my picks for the finest albums of the year, a selection of rap, pop and rock tunes that dug into the recesses of my mind in the most maddening ways.

1. Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

With rock stars now divided between the introspective or, in the case of such megastars as Bono, the preaching, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is a refreshing bit of self-congratulation from the best egomaniac in pop music today. Mixing the earnestness of his previous album with the whirlwind of self-mythologizing bravado from his early stuff, Yeezy makes not only his best album but a masterpiece of mainstream hip-hop, a genre that's been hard up for truly great records over the last few years. Not a single song fails, and several could vie for the title of best Kanye song, from the King Crimson-quoting deification of "Power" to the guest star smorgasbord of "Monster" to the simultaneously plaintive and bitingly satiric "Runaway." I've always liked Kanye's braggadocio more than his music -- even though I've enjoyed that too -- but this is a modern classic.

Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Let me just be clear from the start: I love Kanye West. I love his production values, I love the ambition of his raps (even when he overreaches) and I love the impressive range of his sampling. But most of all, and this is where I break from the majority, I love his ego. These days, it's impossible to find a true egomaniac in pop music. There are self-absorbed celebrities a-plenty, but they don't have ego so much as adolescent petulance. The only time you see any true self-worship now is in the loathsome back-patting of the Bonos of the world, acting as if increasingly stale music and stage shows that suck up untold megawatts are going to save the planet. Kanye West doesn't waste my time acting as if he's important to the vitality of the Earth; he just comes out and lets everyone know that he's better than us, and when he's done singing to a crowd that paid top dollar for concert tickets, he'll go party like a king.

No one else has managed to combine product-placing, corporatist hip-hop culture with the equally hollow "fuck you" attitude of stadium rockers who live on merchandise sales. If West's ego wasn't as massive and self-sustaining as it is, he could never position himself as the last great rock star in an era that demands everything be small and manageable. You can't handle Kanye, and that's what I adore about him.

Thus, when he stripped his sound down to the mellow, minimalist electronica of 808s and Heartbreak, Kanye lost his most precious asset: his bombast. By the same token, it was a logical progression for the man who'd turned himself into the David Bowie of hip-hop, smashing together contradictory genres and complex, occasionally revealing lyrics through a removed, self-aware prism and somehow making it all work within the mainstream. Tom Breihan of the Village Voice rightly compared it to Bowie's Low, though I believe the comparison only applies to the thought process behind it, not the quality. Where Bowie found a way to deliver plaintive desperation through Krautrock hiss and beeps, West stripped the self-love of hip-hop to delve into ideas of loneliness and forlorn love via black roots instead of white noise. At times, the album touched upon R&B; in other places, it traveled all the way back to the tribal drums that formed the basis for all of humanity's music. A great many parts of 808s worked, and the decision to truly give into self-examination after circling the idea in previous albums was a surprisingly candid move for the artist, but he could never fit all his ideas into the sparer sound.

With My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, Kanye finds the bridge between the introspective, forward-thinking pop of 808s and the swirling, cataclysmic excess of his fiery early work. Not only is it West's best album to date, it is the finest mainstream hip-hop album in years, perhaps since OutKast broke out of their rewarding but esoteric sound with Stankonia, or at least M.I.A.'s Kala.

West's latest album is, of course, colored by his tumultuous behavior in recent years. On-stage tantrums over malfunctions, huffy reaction to VMA shutouts (they're VMAs, Kanye. Like you can't just buy any kind of bookends to serve the same purpose?), a hilariously angry blog that poured from a stream of consciousness, all of these things reflected an increasingly erratic MC. People started to turn on Kanye, and even his mother's death from elective surgery could not win him a break as fans descended upon her still-warm body to cluck tongues and speculate over her plastic surgery. It all culminated, of course, with the 2009 VMAs, during which Kanye leaped on the stage as Taylor Swift accepted her award for Best Female Video with a now-infamous (and parodied to death) rant that set the media ablaze with condemnation. Everyone fell upon a black man for ruining some innocent, porcelain doll-faced white woman's moment in the spotlight, and even Jay Leno used the first episode of his execrable 10 p.m. show to humiliate West for ratings, having the gall to bring Kanye's dead mother into the fray. What no one mentioned was that Kanye was right: Beyoncé's video was better, and even MTV agreed when it awarded her Video of the Year -- and I don't recall anyone making a fuss over Beyoncé somehow making the best video period but not the best by a woman (or, for the matter, why artists are credited with music videos they have little to no creative input in). The damage was done, scarring West from the burns of the media and sustaining Taylor Swift's fleeting career for a whole extra year.

With that pressure still weighing on him, West has decided, after trying to make amends in noble but misguided efforts, to take the only sensible route: to laugh it off, get some shots in at himself, and then introduce the public to the most egotistical Kanye yet. Oh, you thought he was a jackass before? Well, just try to withstand the sonic onslaught of a rock star putting aside his personal record and returning to the arena. God help anyone caught in his path.

Opening with an electronic take on "Once Upon a Time" fairy tale introductions, "Dark Fantasy" wastes no time leaping into Ye's fever dream, backing up the invitation to read a hip-hop fable with choir vocals, at last sending West in to start upping himself from the word go. West's flow sounds immensely improved, no longer overstuffed with too many words that threaten to collapse the meter. Only the stray line "Too many Urkels on your team/That's why your win's low" screeches to a halt (it is the worst moment of the album, but at least it passes in an instant). With its church choir chorus, "Dark Fantasy" brings back the religious icon feel of Yeezy. Only West could use such a bombastic and self-serving track as the gentle introduction to his self-promotion.

"Gorgeous" moves into the other side of the album, in which West comes to term with the more insufferable side of his pompous personality. Referencing, among other things, South Park's scathing takedown of his arrogance, West takes stock of the down side of his ego, reframing it around the feeling of being hated by seemingly the whole world. That self-pity turns to self-righteous anger as West refuses to give in to these feelings of victimization, even as he softens his ambitions. "What's a black Beatle anyway?" he asks of his desire to be a legend, "A fucking roach?"

Elsewhere, Yeezy gets deeper into the heart of the war between his ego and the world. "Power" brilliantly samples King Crimson's "21st Century Schizoid Man," a song that described man with everything and nothing. "Nothing he's got, he really needs," intones Greg Lake through distorted vocals, a perfect encapsulation of where Kanye's at right now. The album's centerpiece, "Runaway" pays tribute to himself by way of honoring the "douchebags, assholes and jerkoffs." It's a 10-minute marvel, one of the most garishly self-loving pieces of music ever recorded, but the range of moods covered -- sarcastic, tragic, boastful -- is impressive. By the time it ends, you too will be ready to give a toast to the douchebags.

But not even Kanye can spend the entire time praising himself. "All the Lights" places a number of guests front and center, and the most affecting line is Kanye's brief mourning for Michael Jackson, one of his heroes. "Monster" plays out nearly as a rap duel, pitting Jay-Z, Rick Ross, even the frontman Bon Iver(?) against each other. Then Nicki Minaj bursts in and just destroys them. It's a fierce number, and another that Yeezy entrusts to others. Yet his hand guides these tracks, his expertise with production orchestrating the guests until they feel like conduits for Kanye's vision. I've heard a handful of complaints regarding the production values of this album, and I just cannot comprehend them. West has never been so able to capture the full bombast of his self-love, but here he at last directs everything back to its source: himself. It's utterly shameless, and utterly brilliant.

Wronged by the VMAs and humiliated at the hands of no less ignominious a villain as Jay Leno, West uses My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy to make his own plaudits. When he closes out "Blame Game" with an extended Chris Rock bit, he makes his own talk show in which he is the beloved star, not the butt of a joke. It turns the album into a variety hour, complete with the parade of musical guests, all of them working to make Kanye look good. The voices come together on "Lost in the World," all auto-tuned to magnify the sound further as West gets some last minute proclamations in, and it's amazing how fresh the album still feels at this point.

With nowhere else to go, West releases us from his glorious present and looks to the future, taking a spoken-word performance by Gil Scott-Heron to tackle the vicious political climate that has resurfaced in America. Scott-Heron's portentous poem, punctuated by profane innuendo, lets us know that Yeezy knows of the problems that affect us mere mortals, but the hilarious suggestion inherent in the track is that West considers the self-immolation of the United States as it enters the final stages of its days as a superpower the only implosion more spectacular than his. "If God had an iPod," CyHi Da Prynce raps in "So Appalled," "I'd be on his playlist." It's a line West must wish he'd said himself, but by the end of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, even a self-promoter like Kanye must have realized that particular truth was self-evident.

Sonic Youth — Daydream Nation

The opening chords of Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation lurch, dissipate and echo as if reaching through the murk of the '80s underground, searching for that vein of emotional and sociopolitical gold that ran through the rough of cocaine-fueled hyper-gloss. Sonic Youth, having honed their craft from a messy, highly experimental yet tame no-wave sound into something unique and formidable with previous albums EVOL and Sister, were on the precipice of launching themselves to the top of the budding indie rock heap. In Kim Gordon's drifting prologue, the band at last sees the path to glory, and they break through to it with as much majesty as rock 'n roll has ever contained.

When the riff for "Teen Age Riot" flies out of the speaker as soon as Gordon's prose fades, you know the band has crossed a threshold. An anthem worthy of placement with "Like a Rolling Stone," "Born to Run" and "My Generation," "Teen Age Riot" manages to cement the noise side of the band after it developed over the last two albums even as the group blended it with their first dose of pure, unadulterated pop. Unlike those aforementioned odes to defiance, "Teen Age Riot" is not a call to arms, instead capturing the feelings of youth in all their ennui. By not presenting adolescence as an "us vs. them" struggle with the outside forces of the establishment and elders but a tug-of-war within teenagers' own ranks for a sense of clarity, "Teen Age Riot" achieves the purity of an anthem with the complexity of a more realized composition.

From there, Daydream Nation combines the heightened songwriting ability the band displayed on their previous two albums with their propensity for elongating tunes into noise jams in a live setting. Songs easily stretch past the six- and seven-minute marks, elongating the band's most developed pop hooks into its most successful art-noise jams yet. "Cross the Breeze" opens with jangling, blissful chords before morphing into a fast-paced freak-fest that might pass for a thrash metal song. When Kim Gordon, at her most intensely stand-offish, enters the mix several minutes in, she leads the Youth through a song too long and disoriented to be considered punk but so righteous and furious that it's impossible to view it as anything but. "The Sprawl" is even looser, propelled by a tight beat that pits the band against each other as if in a battle royale. Both songs shouldn't stay together; you expect them to take off in a thousand different directions, either in reckless abandon or mathematical precision. Instead, the group always finds their way, always keeps the beat and always finds just the right balance between considerable ability and free-form, emotional playing.

When the lengths of the songs are tighter, as they are on "Silver Rocket" and most of the second LP, Sonic Youth attains a ferocity they occasionally displayed but never fully developed. The echoing clang of Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore's guitars, the buzz and hum of Gordon's bass and the carefully modulated sloppiness of Steve Shelley form a white-hot focal point on the shorter numbers, melting through whatever surface they touch. The raucous "Kissability" shows off Gordon's dry wit, while the three-part finale pays homage to the band that pointed the way for Sonic Youth's growth into the ultimate teen band, Dinosaur Jr.

Daydream Nation, despite being released the year before I was born, always sends me back to visions of high school, slamming lockers and idly doodling in binders. Like all teenagers, Daydream Nation mumbles, moves around uncertainly and self-consciously. But it also has the bravado of youth, the brash confidence of its crashing punk sound. Beneath it all, though, is the sincerity that marks the best of adolescence: we may not have a damn clue how the world works, but we mean well and want to change things for the better. And that's a damn sight more appealing than selling out for greater popularity and wealth (right Boomers?).

I actually have less to say about Daydream Nation than other Youth albums, such as Sister or the magnificent late-career masterpiece Murray Street. But the simplicity is what I most admire about the album. On its surface, it's just a blend of songwriting hooks and post-Krautrock electronic wash, but that doesn't get at its appeal. After all, Krautrock itself was, in the best cases, a mixture of pop hooks and sonic wash. What makes Daydream Nation so transcendent of time is the subtle, almost indescribable manner in which the band marries that sound to an undercurrent of shared emotion. Nearly everyone can relate to the feeling expressed by the record, even though the lyrics themselves border on nonsense (or, given how rarely anything approaches logic in the words, perhaps it's more accurate to say they border on sense).

One of the few enduring classics of the 1980s, Daydream Nation is all the proof one would ever need of Sonic Youth's greatness. Fortunately, they decided to pad their resumé with at least three or four other classics, just in case. Dinosaur Jr. inspired Sonic Youth with their seminal You're Living All Over Me, but Moore, Gordon and co. replaced J. Mascis' sludge with a sort of industrial twang; yes, there is a hint of country sorrow under the punk and no-wave influences, and maybe that's the aspect that makes Daydream Nation so gripping. That trace of a genre built upon self-pity, however justified, fits seamlessly with the crafting of the ultimate teenage anthem. It took numerous listens to glean that from the record, to hear in the echo of ringing guitars the sound of outlaws. Most of the country rebels weren't really that dangerous, and they peddled an angst not too dissimilar from the sort that alt.rockers sell. The only difference is that country aims years down the road, once the doubt of youth reveals itself to be a correct foreshadowing of a broken life. Because that sound, whether the band intended it or not, moves through the cascading mix of sounds and moods, Daydream Nation not only survives for each new generation of teenagers, it can be equally affecting as one moves out of that age range. It's as forward-thinking as it is nostalgic. Not bad for an album that contains the lines "To the extent that I wear skirts/and cheap nylon slips/I've gone native/I wanted to know the exact dimension of hell."

Pavement — Slanted and Enchanted

No songwriter better exemplifies that old maxim our mothers used to tell us, "It's not what you said but how you said it" like Stephen Malkmus of Pavement. Scarcely any songs of the band's earliest (and best, though Pavement maintained such a standard of quality that the distinction is a matter only for die-hards) recordings hold up to any lyrical scrutiny, with unhelpful liner notes only offering one of countless misdirections and the obscurity of the lines themselves never letting on whether the group was sincere or taking the piss.

When processed through the band, however, these floating reveries of sub-Bowie free association become intense and universal, the soundtrack of the suburbs in a way that neither glamorizes bourgeois life nor, and this is important, condescends to the stifling ennui of middle-class conformity. Plenty of Malkmus' lyrics are hip and sardonic, but the manner in which he can cast his irony aside for a moment of sincerity without warning suggests that the real joke is acting as if he doesn't care.

After making a handful of EPs that hinted at Pavement's direction but lacked even the cohesion of their early, looser albums, Malkmus finally bolstered the spare lineup of guitarist/vocalist Scott Kannberg (a.k.a. Spiral Stairs) and 40-something drummer/producer Gary Young with bassist Mark Ibold and multi-instrumentalist Bob Nastanovich. Before either could get down to business, however, the original trio convened for their debut full-length, kissing off the old Pavement by offering the first complete taste of what they had to offer. The result is perhaps the greatest of lo-fi masterpieces, and an enduring staple of indie rock.

Slanted and Enchanted sounds like crap. Even in its remastered form, it hisses and buries the mix to the point that you wonder if the band accidentally set up in the same room as the soundboard without realizing the mics were next door. Not helping matters is the fact that Kannberg played bass lines by running a down-tuned guitar through a bass amp, or that Young was so routinely plastered during the few weeks of recording that Nastanovich had to keep time for him. Yet the grimy sonic wash somehow benefits from its grubby recording, giving the whole thing an air of authenticity most bands would kill for these days.

It is a time-consuming enterprise to act as if one doesn't care. Proper attention must be paid to the right sort of anti-fashion, the practiced glares of defiance, the careful judging of just enough success to make a living without going noticed by a major label or more than a vaguely defined "acceptable" number of fans. Even Jarvis Cocker, who deftly avoided the pissing match that was the Britpop's movement to out-working-class every other band, had too much style and cool to be totally immune to image-making. Pavement may have been the first band that genuinely didn't give a damn, or at least the first to mix that with music so compelling that no sane individual could, once hearing it, could ignore.

From the opening hum of "Summer Babe (Winter Version)," SM and co. establish the warring contradictions of the album, not so much a balance between noise rock and pop as a tug of war that never consistently cedes to any one side. Malkmus' lyricism, though nowhere near the impressionistic purity of, say, Van Morrison's, nevertheless cuts to the heart of everything while circumventing the subject entirely. One might as well count to infinity than name the songs focusing on an unattainable woman, but "Summer Babe" uses lines like "Ice baby,/I saw your girlfriend and she was/Eating her fingers like they're just another meal" to evoke deeply personal visions of that someone you had a crush on but could never approach.

The chief influence on the band, at least in these days, was The Fall, and the impact of Mark E. Smith's absurdist realism, to say nothing of the percussive, careening style of his singing and his ever-shifting lineup's playing, can be felt all over Slanted and Enchanted. The energetic "Conduit for Sale!" might as well credit Smith as a co-writer, what with its repeated yelp of "I'm trying!" over clanging guitar squeals. Yet where the early EPs show the band only occasionally moving beyond Smith's influence, Slanted and Enchanted cements Malkmus as his own writer and Kannberg as his own arranger.

Smith could never really handle sincerity, at least not in the plaintive sense, but Pavement throws a curveball when they reach "Here," a song that would qualify instantly as a power ballad were it not as angular and obscure as any of the songs on the record. But its first pair of lines are so direct that the song grips you instantly: "I was dressed for success/But success it never came." No song on the album better epitomizes the band's ability to condense an entire worldview into a few cogent lines before diverging into esoteric absurdity and surrealism that only deepens the meaning. So many affecting songs rely on targeting a specific feeling and addressing it vaguely enough to be universally appealing while inserting a few phrases focused enough to give the audience an easy feeling of "Hey, this guy's on my wavelength!" Malkmus gives an audience on the barest of threads to go on before moving into areas that only he can understand, and that brave willingness to expose only himself without throwing us all into the mix makes his lyrics more powerful than a number of more direct songs.

In that respect, Pavement's reception by rock critics surprises me. Without much in the way of traditional hooks (the band always pulls back just before they settle into an identifiable groove) or discernible lyrics, the group offers critics few of the traditional ledges to latch onto for an analysis. Yet the rock press fell over themselves to praise the album, shooting it to the top of best-of lists before Slanted and Enchanted even hit record store shelves (well, in the few places that would stock it, anyway). Ray Carney, that lover of Cassavetes and one of the more thought-provoking contrarians in film criticism, bases much of his critical approach to a typically stand-offish view of traditional criticism. He says teachers, critics and those the former instruct look for symbols and metaphors as a way of cheaply unpacking a work of art into something manageable while ignoring the nuance and tones of a film or book. "Metaphors, symbols, images are the most primitive way of making artistic meaning," he said in one interview, looking, as ever, for a fight. As much as I find Carney infuriating in his condescension and arrogance, I think his point, while not a universal truth, does apply in cases: certain bands and directors -- even, I think, great ones -- put out works that directly appeal to a broad audience because an artist lives of his or her work, and the more people who can identify with it, the more copies or tickets one sells.

Rock writers, or at least the best ones, tend to follow Carney's view of ideal criticism. Lester Bangs, Robert Christgau, Cameron Crowe, vastly different as they all are, are linked by one universal trait: they wrote according to how the music hit them. Bangs, the greatest of music critics, got at the heart of the matter: he responded to primitivism, writing exegeses on neglected garage rock and trashing any band that dared to treat rock 'n roll as anything more than an outlet for savagery. For him, rock was about feeling, not just any feeling but the primal, unevolved emotions that poke out from behind social conditioning.

Pavement, with its perfect blend of sneering indifference and freely associated personal relevance, strike a chord and steadily grow in cultural stature as Nirvana fades more with each passing year. Kurt Cobain could put misery into chunks of Pixies-esque pop that appealed to the demographic that had not yet figured out its emotions: teenagers. Malkmus, in contrast, didn't humor the young by suggesting that their feelings were true and that society really didn't understand. No, Malkmus captured the doubt of puberty and that nagging feeling of reason in every teen's mind that what you're thinking isn't necessarily how things truly are, that the anxieties and pain are real in the sense that they are felt, but also misleading in that they do not carry an understanding of the world. Ergo, Pavement is sarcastic but also lets that front drop without vanishing, mocking the SoCal lifestyle relentlessly but acknowledging the band returning to the suburbs at night for safety. By admitting this dichotomy, they avoid becoming hypocrites.

Slanted and Enchanted placed second on the Village Voice's annual Pazz & Jop list comprising the submitted lists of numerous critics, but it has yet to be certified gold. Even today, it exists more as an acid test for underground music fans than a cultural touchstone on the level of Nevermind. Pavement would clean up their sound (barely) on their next album, Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and brush with commercial success, only to react against it as if placing a hand on a hot stove and instinctively pulling back immediately to avoid serious damage. That album offers serious competition to the title of best Pavement album, though all five LPs are great, but what makes Slanted and Enchanted such an enduring landmark for those in the know is how personal the method of sharing it is. I spent quite a lot of time in high school sneering at those who enjoyed something up to the point that most of the other students caught on, only to abandon it -- bands weren't the only target; even YouTube videos suddenly lost favor in the eyes of the beholder -- but Pavement's music suggests a more emotional reason to limit an audience. Slanted and Enchanted works because nobody has yet made the mistake of assigning any central meaning that tidies up the mess of an album. Even the routine mentions of suburbia that run through every review of the band's early work -- including this one -- are less attempts to summarize the album than the placement of one of the many ideas Malkmus' lyrics swirl around provocatively. Pavement sang about disaffection with SoCal and its celebrity worship, but the music could speak to a suburbanite in any state, as well as someone living in the city. Just shy of two decades later, it has solidified its position as one of the defining works of the 1990s, and one of the few works that can proudly call itself indie. Of course, because it is true indie, it would never call attention to itself so openly.

David Bowie — Station to Station

Station to Station is the only album that has ever truly scared me. For all its electronic processing and sonic layering, it is a record in the vein of a singer/songwriter confessional. What makes it terrifying is the fact that the confessor is so strung out he has no idea what he's letting the audience in on. Every spin of Station to Station throws you into the mouth of madness, wrenched open in a silent shriek of pain and despair, and the soul Bowie put into the record has nothing at all to do with the kind of soul he thought he was putting into it.

Released on Jan. 23, 1976, exactly three months before the Ramones unleashed the bubbling punk movement and over a year before The Clash and the Sex Pistols would finally put the London scene on wax, Bowie bypassed punk altogether and laid damn near all the foundations for punk's late-'70s evolution into post-punk. Station to Station contains jagged guitars, fractured lyrics and a vacuum that sucks out all the air and leaves only a faint chill as your lungs collapse. (It's a sound Bowie would also implement on his friend Iggy Pop's albums to revive Pop's dead career; incidentally, Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis was later found dead from hanging with a copy of Pop's The Idiot still spinning on the record player.)

Bowie's forte before (and since) lied in his ability to craft complicated but appealing pop tunes within the time limits of commercial radio. So the prospect of an album of his opening with a 10-minute cut must have appealing not even to his most devoted fans. Yet the title track is one of the great works of late-'70s rock and one of the few lengthy pieces of the era not to suffer from bloat and showboating. Starting with the faint sound of a train, "Station to Station" kicks into gear before a haunting sustained guitar chord and two-note piano motif jump into the mix in a manner that actually makes the track seem quieter and more minimalistic than it was. The band slowly falls into place around a plodding riff that continues for several minutes, rising and falling in the void, lost and bedraggled.

At last, Bowie enters, spewing some of his most obtuse lyrics. Presenting his latest alter-ego, the Thin White Duke, via a re-introduction, Bowie inserts such oddball lines as "The European cannon is here" (yes, that kind of cannon). Yet the track chugs for so long that he starts to give himself away, he rousing cheer of "Drink! Drink! Raise your glass! Raise your glass high!" taking on a more ominous, desperate tone. And when he hits the lyric, "It's not the side-effects of the cocaine/I'm thinking that it must be love," the cracks form in the dike.

Some cite the next track, the disco tune "Golden Years," as the misfit among the rest of the album's darker textures, but it follows naturally from the title track, which fades into the nothingness it flirted with for 10 minutes. Consider this stanza:

Some of these days, and it won't be long
Gonna drive back down where you once belonged
In the back of a dream car twenty foot long
Don't cry my sweet, don't break my heart
Doing all right, but you gotta get smart
Wish upon, wish upon, day upon day, I believe oh lord
I believe, oh Lord, I believe all the way
Come get up my baby
Run for the shadows, run for the shadows, run for the shadows in these golden years

Just as the most raucous lyrics in the title track were the most revealing, so too does the party mentality of "Golden Years" belie the mounting horror of Bowie's existence. This song, more than any of the others, is the only one that even gives us the hint that the singer is aware he's falling apart. Instead of doing something about it, though, he tries to dismiss reality as the whispers of a bad trip, so he dances and snorts all the harder in an attempt to outpace creeping madness.

When Bowie slows down, as he does on "Word on a Wing," he achieves a genuine emotion absent from his earlier, more Brechtian efforts. As if the coming down from his coke high, Bowie bottoms out for the first time on the album. Bowie's most beautiful ballad since "Letter to Hermione," "Word on a Wing" contains several religious lyrics, even an entreaty to the Lord. Yet what make it so affecting is that Bowie sings with a defeated croon that suggests a scoundrel who already turned to his last refuge and found no quarter there either. Bowie later said that he'd never considered religion until this time in his life, but even in his moments of semi-belief, he cannot commit to total faith: "Just because I believe don't mean I don't think as well/Don't have to question everything in heaven or hell." The religious conviction may be in question, but the passion is not. Only halfway through the album, the star teeters on collapse

The second side of the album shows Bowie snorting another line and getting a jolt. Where the lengthy "Station to Station" led into the rave "Golden Years" on Side One, Side Two reverse the structure. With the adrenaline rush, Bowie jumps right into "TVC 15," a paranoid, pre-Videodrome rocker about a woman being devoured by a television. Layered with conflicting sounds, shouts and rhythms, "TVC 15" is an entire party mix tape in one song -- funky, rocking, danceable -- with gobbledygook for lyrics that the people in the club can ignore even as they reveal the depths of Bowie's (and Iggy Pop's, as the inspiration came from Pop's hallucination) fractured mind.

The second long track on the album, "Stay," follows, and it's as exhilarating as it is nightmarish. Four minutes shorter than the opening title track, "Stay" manages to contain even less of the actual star of the show than the instrumental workout of "Station to Station." Bowie sings plaintive lyrics to an unknown partner, but his delivery clashes with the spirit of the song. As he cries "stay," he drifts further and further away. The end of "Stay" morphs into an extended jam featuring fiery fretwork courtesy of lead guitarist Earl Slick. Ian Mathers, writing for the late and lamented Stylus magazine, dug into the darker implications of this structural breakdown, saying, "David has left the building, he’s gone to Berlin. He couldn’t take it anymore. The music grinds on inescapably, outlasting the man." This is partially true: by the end of "Stay," Bowie has at last collapsed, though he still has one more song to sing, but it would be too optimistic to say he'd left for Berlin. He still had a world tour ahead of him, one that would only accelerate his downward spiral. This isn't the sound of Bowie checking out to go detox; it's just the sound of him checking out.

No wonder, then, that the album ends with a cover, allowing Bowie to give himself a rest from writing anything else as he falls apart. Yet the power of "Wild is the Wind" eclipses the Johnny Mathis original and the Nina Simone. Dimitri Thomkin and Ned Washington's spare lyrics are stretched even further apart, backed up by a simple drum beat and an ephemeral guitar lick. Even then, Bowie cannot stay with the band, throwing too many words into one line and slowing down to a crawl in others. It's the kind of song you expect to hear not in the stadiums where Bowie played before and after but in a damp, poorly lit nightclub on a Wednesday night, a sustained note of fatalism for all the people who couldn't even make it to the weekend to drink away their sorrows. By now, the nerves are dead, and the cocaine no longer has the effect. Only when he snorts enough of the stuff that he turns ashy and pale himself can he even feel. The Thin White Duke is back, but not for long.

Somehow, Station to Station stayed on the charts in both the UK and the US, where it actually placed higher than in Bowie's homeland. "Golden Years" surely got people to the record store, but the album is so out there, so desperate, so musically adventurous that it surprises me it stayed on the charts for months -- I played the album today for my mom, who had, as every heterosexual woman who grew up in the '70s, a mad crush on David Bowie. She only recognized "Golden Years." Maybe those who snatched up the album, like its maker, were just too far gone to realize what was being communicated in it.

Lester Bangs didn't miss it, though. Far from a Bowie fan, Bangs had been impressed by the dated Young Americans, but he piled on the praise for this. "[Station to Station is] an honest attempt by a talented artist to take elements of rock, soul music, and his own idiosyncratic and occasionally pompous showtune/camp predilections, and rework this seemingly contradictory melange of styles into something new and powerful." So strung-out and sped-up is Bowie that the titles printed on the album cover are blurred, spitting out "STATIONTOSTATIONDAVID-BOWIE," and in that desperation Bangs, as he always did, found the darkness that mirrored his own. At last, for the hardest man in rock to please, Bowie had proven himself.

Following the album's release, Bowie embarked on his largest world tour yet, revealing yet another side to the artist's endless reinvention in the form of minimalism: in place of an opening act was a screening of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali's short, surreal masterpiece Un Chien Andalou, and the show itself featured an unadorned band on a vast, mostly empty stage as a white light pulsated throughout the show. It's a miracle the concerts never became a farewell tour ending with a roadie discovering the star face-down in a pool of his own nose-blood. Amazingly, the tour went amazingly, and the recent remaster of Station to Station -- which is noticeably quieter than previous mixes but gives greater weight and clarity to the spaces between the jagged instrumentation -- comes with a fantastically cleaned-up version of the legendary bootleg of Bowie's show at the Nassau Coliseum. It's a white-hot performance that shows the touring band not only capturing the conflicting sounds of the album but enhancing them and retro-fitting them to old hits. (I was amused by Bowie's cover of the Velvet Underground's "Waiting For the Man," not only because Bowie never came closer to becoming his idol Lou Reed but because the line "$26 in my hand" is so inadequate for Bowie's drug of choice and the amount he buys: 26 bucks wouldn't buy enough coke for Bowie to get ready for the proper amount of coke he'd bought with thousands of dollars.)

Looking back now, many casual fans would say that Bowie had already peaked, that he'd recorded most of his hits and wouldn't come back until the '80s, when he presided over the New Wave and synthpop groups like a fashionable godfather. I, however, think that, while Bowie had made some great albums by this point and had established himself as the dominant pop star of the decade, Station to Station was his first masterpiece, and the launchpad for four subsequent classics through 1980's Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps). Bowie always seemed comfortable in anyone's skin except his own, but he'd never been able to fully incorporate his two favorite influences: Lou Reed, and -- in much broader terms -- black music like blues and funk. With the Krautrock-flavored Berlin trilogy ahead of him, Station to Station announced a shift from removed Brechtian overtones into outright mechanization, yet he somehow finally made the raw power of the Velvets and the gripping, emotional heft of funk and R&B work in his new sound. There is no reason why the album should work, not from the lyrical standpoint of spiraling out of control and being too-revealing, not from the musical standpoint of throwing together electronic minimalism, disco, funk and acid rock. And yet, it does, and the fascinating, psychologically repellent results keep me coming back for more than with any Bowie album. For a time I considered Low, his subsequent album and a better mix of the darker thoughts here with the lighter side that sobriety and Brian Eno would bring, but not even that album holds me like this one. This, as much as John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band, is the sound of fame eating a man's soul. John Lennon fought back through primal therapy and won. Here, David Bowie isn't so lucky.

John Lennon — John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band

When the Beatles started crumbling in earnest around late 1968/'69, John Lennon vented his dissatisfaction with a few solo albums made with Yoko Ono. The three of them -- Two Virgins, Life With the Lions and Wedding Album -- allowed the two to experiment more fully with their experimental sides, and they will test the patience of even the most committed fan. The pair did, however, begin to move out of their tape-looping nonsense for a number of singles that showed Lennon's creative spark had not been diluted by disillusionment, singles like "Cold Turkey" and "Instant Karma! (We All Shine On)."

Yet it was only when the Beatles finally collapsed that Lennon and Ono finally moved into producing albums worthy of the band John just left. The final years of Lennon's songwriting with the Fab Four revealed the direction of John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band long before the lovers underwent Dr. Arthur Janov's Primal Scream therapy. Following his psychedelic sonic innovation on Sgt. Pepper's, his writing became starker, more impassioned, more given to self-evaluation, a great deal of it harsh. The only difference between the yelped pleading of "I Want You (She's So Heavy)" and the shrieks of JL/POB opening track "Mother" is that the last barrier was knocked down.

The Japanese release of the album translated the title John no Tamashii, meaning "John's Soul," and I can think of no better summary of the contents of the best album to come out of the Beatles' disintegration. While not quite as terrifying and bleak as some say, there can be no doubt that Plastic Ono Band is therapy put to vinyl, a purification by fire of everything on John's mind. The song titles -- among them "Isolation," "God," "Love" -- are as bare as the recordings, direct and honest to the point of bluntness.

What is surprising, though, is the range the album covers. The funereal bell that opens "Mother" establishes a heartbreaking song charting Lennon's feelings of abandonment, but "I Found Out" shows John dealing with the pain of the Beatles' downfall in much angrier terms. It trashes George Harrison's fascination with Hare Krishna and gurus, makes sardonic reference to Paul and generally mocks the idea of any of the Fab Four as rock or religious icons. That thread is picked up even more explicitly in "God," which throws out the rocking vibe of "I Found Out" for a piano lick that scatters into deep space as Lennon shouts his rejection into the heavens.

Meanwhile, "Well Well Well," which loosely ties together considerations of guilt, love, women's liberation and revolution, could stand with the proto-metal found in the Beatles' "Helter Skelter" and "I Want You." Looking at the cropped hair Yoko and John sport on the cover, the bite of the song could easily be a reference to their bitter attitude not only toward the times but of the "revolution's" failure. That the Beatles were (and remain) the symbol of the '60s, the death of flower power only hurts Lennon more deeply.

When Lennon steps outside himself and his hangups, the results are beautiful, and in some cases no less forceful than his personalized rants. "Working Class Hero" never became the anthem it clearly wants to be, but only because it has the complexity of a well-considered social examination. Rather than resort to rah-rah, fist-pumping simplification, Lennon points out how badly the working class wants to be homogenized and tamed by the bourgeoisie. At the other end of the spectrum, "Love" points to the John Lennon who would emerge from this tumultuous album, a more centered individual who would finally find a balance in life between his creativity and his personal well-being. Like all the songs of the album, the lyrics are straightforward, childish in anyone else's hands, but John makes the adolescence of the lyrics the entire point: after two failed marriages -- one literal, the other a metaphorical bonding between his bandmates -- he finally feels that love he never felt even as a young man proposing to Cynthia, and certainly not with any of the groupies he would have inevitably slept with. The circumstances of his meeting Yoko are not ideal (certainly not to Cynthia), but anyone who felt that Yoko simply manipulated Lennon cannot justify that opinion in this face of this baby-faced expression of adoration without sounding like a spiteful fool.

In the first stanza of "God," Lennon sings "God is a concept/By which we measure our pain" but what sticks out is the following line: "I'll say it again." He wants to make absolutely clear what he is leaving behind with this album. What is darkly amusing about his denouncements is the way that he spends so much time attacking his iconic status that he ultimately enshrines the Beatles with all the religious and social figures he casts aside. He first created the comparison between the band and religion with the "Bigger than Jesus" comment, and he forces the juxtaposition again here by definitively rejecting both. He may be denying both, but he's placing them on equal ground in the process.

John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band is one of those albums that some might feel obligated to cherish instead of enjoying. It's too ephemeral to be embraced as a statement of angst, but too demanding of the listener's attention to be pop. Yet the album is anything but arduous, and its sparsity gives Lennon the room to bare himself in a way few singer/songwriters have ever had the courage to express. By throwing it all out in a rasped scream of agony, he not only crafts his most beautiful and searing statement but cleanses himself to return to writing masterful pop tunes, which he would do with his next album. This isn't the sound of a man's descent into a personal hell, it's of a baptism.

Happy birthday, John. This place fucking sucks without you.

Van Morrison — Astral Weeks

(This review cross-posted at Sputnikmusic.com)

Van Morrison's Astral Weeks, his first "proper" solo album after departing popular garage rockers Them*, has become one of those artistic touchstones that practically wards off anyone actually enjoying it, as to touch a LP (or DVD, or copied painting) would rub the oily grease of the filthy and mortal onto timelessness and thus muck it up. But few rock albums -- if you could call the jazz-folk-classical music contained within "rock" by any stretch -- are as paradoxically inviting as this ultra-complex recording. What The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady was to jazz, so too was this to pop: a poetic, rich expression of desperate romanticism and hope from a notoriously mercurial, yet wildly ingenious, performer.

The eight tracks that make up Astral Weeks are love songs, but that's far too general an assessment. Each song is its own story, a tale of wretched, despairing individuals looking for their place in the world and, more importantly, someone with whom to share that space. Astral Weeks contains heaps of heartbreak, but it is not a break-up album. It's not even an album about striking out. It's about never getting up to bat in the first place; like the great sonnets, Astral Weeks deals with the one-sided love a freak of the underclass feels for someone so far outside his caste that to even speak to that person would cause social embarrassment for the object of desire.

The title track openly deals with this pain, as Morrison croons to a woman involved with a far more dapper man than he. "Takin’ good care of your boy/Seein’ that he’s got clean clothes/Puttin’ on his little red shoes/I see you know he’s got clean clothes," he moans only able to stand dumbly before them struck mute by overwhelming desire as they point at him like they would any other oddball vagabond. Morrison continues this thread of abstract pleading with "Beside You," a tune that flies in the face of typical rock balladry -- all chauvinist posturing usually presenting lovey sentiment as a front to get in someone's pants -- by setting his ideal place with his love at her side, not in front. That distinction is as important as Morrison's lyrical style in general, which tumbles out in impressionistic sketches that create vibrant images of lusting for a teenage girl ("Cyprus Avenue") and a drag queen down on his luck ("Madam George").

To call them sketches, even, is to imply that they are unfinished, which is untrue. Better to say sketches in the sense that the portraits are complete but rough enough to spark the imagination of the appraiser. The album's first lines, "If I ventured in the slipstream/Between the viaducts of your dreams" are so out-there that they create a surreal bedrock that grounds the entire album, yet by the second listen such lyrics are as essential to the "narrative" as anything describing the characters Morrison crafts. These lines break the songs of Astral Weeks from the literal quality found in Morrison's single-track masterpiece "T.B. Sheets," that infinitely disturbing dirge that proved the genius of Van the Man far more readily than "Gloria" or "Brown-Eyed Girl." Here, Morrison's penchant for such bizarre, atmospheric lines shatters the songs in such a way that "Cyprus Avenue" doesn't communicate the disturbing hint of ephebophilia it should but a universal sense of deep, unrestrained longing. Similarly, "Madam George" may well not be about a transvestite, as Morrison long contended, as the character is so human that we place ourselves in this bleak world that has reduced George to a series of actions so perfunctory they may be as involuntary as breathing. George is outlandish enough a person to live a far grander life, but even the people who attend his parties but cannot look him in the eye, and when a defeated George boards a train out of Belfast at the end to perhaps find some shred of happiness and acceptance, Morrison turns the song into one of the great outcast anthems, speaking more directly to feelings of alienation than even the best punk and metal.

Morrison's lyrical style propels the album through its various styles, both the anchor at the extremity of his musical wondering: every so often, Morrison latches onto a phrase in one of his songs and simply sings it over and over. Whether gently repeating "to be born again" on the title track or building to a miniature frenzy and a barely restrained scat singing session with his rapid "Way up on, way up on, way up on, etc." on "Cyprus Avenue" -- this restraint would disappear in a live format, where Morrison would close his shows in the '70s with a fiercely impassioned version of the song -- Van uses his repetitions to get at the heart of the material, tapping into the slipstream of the album itself to allow for easy passage from the folky opener to the jagged harpsichord of "Cyprus Avenue" to the borderline swing of "The Way That Young Lovers Do" (signaled out as a departure from the rest of the album, but damn it we need some moment of lighter material to calm down) to the deceptively simply chord progression of "Ballerina."

No ordinary musicians could follow Morrison through this journey through what is basically all the roots music the Stones didn't cover with Exile on Main St., and Van enlisted a powerhouse group of session men with storied backgrounds in jazz. Bassist Ray Davis, who aligns so perfectly with Morrison that he's likely responsible for the album's cohesion, played on Eric Dolphy's Out to Lunch. Warren Smith played percussion for Miles Davis, Nat King Cole and more, while drummer Connie Kay recorded with the Modern Jazz Quartet. Guitarist Jay Berliner even contributed to Mingus' The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady. (John Payne also contributes woodwinds throughout.) Only on an album like Astral Weeks could this considerable lineup not be considered overqualified to work on a pop record, but these cats give it their all as they navigate through Morrison's constructed cosmos.

After all, not even Davis guides the record as much as Van's voice, one of the most astonishingly elastic in rock history. Though Astral Weeks lacks some of the inspired scatting that can be found on such seminal pieces as "Listen to the Lion," Van manages to run through a number of styles one would consider impossible for a white man to pull off. Blue-eyed soul was a pejorative term for crackers who tried to ape the sound of James Brown, Ray Charles and others while essentially softening the racial tradition of the form in order to play to segregated radio stations. Morrison invalidates the racial distinction: just because he's white doesn't mean he can't feel pain, and his warbles, croons, moans and yells are as passionate as anything to come out of Motown, precisely because he doesn't really want to simply copy Stax/Volt artists (though he did just that with his next album, Moondance and was no less convincing) but to explore his own emotions. Consider how Morrison turns the simply constructed "Ballerina" into a dramatic piece simply through his voice modulations, moving from desire to joy to weariness, defeat and, at last, fleeting hope in seven minutes of breathtaking dynamic shifts.

How exactly Van's travels through the passages of his nasal cavity work still defy me, and many people, myself included, dismiss him early on as a grating singer. But those who bother to truly listen to his vocal stretches and how they apply to the material. As he does with the lyrics, Morrison uses his oddball ululations to find some shared current between artist and audience, somehow warping his deeply personal impression of the world, here contained to Belfast like a companion piece to Joyce's own stream-of-consciousness vision of Dublin, into something that burrows into our own way of thinking until the abstract becomes the familiar, as if we'd come up with the actual lyrics and sent them to Morrison to sing. Even esoteric lines such as "Talking to Huddie Leadbetter/Showin' pictures on the walls," derived from something as simple as Morrison's habit of bringing a poster of Lead Belly on the road with him to hang on the walls of his various rooms take on a resonance in those who have no clue who the hell the legendary bluesman is.

In his beautiful, in-depth and vital essay on Astral Weeks, gonzo critic Lester Bangs noted, "Van Morrison was 22 -- or 23 -- years old when he made this record; there are lifetimes behind it." What he doesn't mention is that the material on Astral Weeks existed in some form for several years, and that some of this material existed in a larval state before the man exited his teens. But the sentiment is entirely correct: most young adults are earnest. We are coming into our beliefs for the first time, to say nothing of the fact that we are emerging from the stifling cocoon society wraps its children inside, eyes burning and blinking in the sudden burst of light before vision clears to show a world so much more troubling than the movies and the pop ballads could every convey. Most of us try to run back into the shell, to wallow in adolescence until something forcibly removes us from the haven; it explains why so many indie rockers make their living adamantly trying not to learn how to play, how even the best of them (Modest Mouse, the initial promise of Arcade Fire) work because they trade in off-key pop that's sincere and clever enough to appeal to the hip but no less afraid of maturity than most of what burns up the charts.

Morrison never cared for any of that. Like recent Joy Division/Bruce Springsteen mash-up The National, Van understands that the only way to get through adulthood is to accept it, but not without paying attention. The tortured characters found within Astral Weeks are just as grotesque as anyone in a Tom Waits vignette, and even more tragic. I've never held much stock in the antipathy people feel toward politics in art (though I certainly don't value it to the same extent as humanism); emotional didactism exists as much as proselytizing in art, and I find manipulation toward a desired feeling cheaper than an intellectual message, however dumbly stated. But if humanism overpowers politics, and it does, then it can be even more confrontational, and I can think of no other album that forces the listener to evaluate and re-evaluate life like Astral Weeks. Through Morrison, the fictional characters become real, and the performer serves as the conduit to transfer their pain onto us.

Like the best jazz, Astral Weeks is layered, intricate and heady without sacrificing its property of inner transportation. It's less impressive that Van Morrison made this as a young man than it is that anyone tapped into such a pure musical vein at any stage of life. Released in a period dominated by either political confrontation or drugged-out visions of utopia, Astral Weeks finds the perfect balance, forcing us to look at the world even as it cobbles together a message of hope that's more earned than the tune-in-drop-out fantasies that distracted the boomers from all the goals they thought they were accomplishing by doping up and listening to the Flying Burrito Brothers. His Belfast is neither Heaven nor Hell but simply Earth, a place of darkness and light. Caught in the purity of his music, Morrison does not give into depression, no matter how tempting it is at times, relating universal pain and then trying to find the path that leads out of it. What he recognizes at the end, on a "Slim Slow Slider" cut off with a guitar slap that silences what was meant to be a longer jam, is that we cannot escape from reality. For all its nastiness, that recognition is as forward-looking and hopeful as any other upbeat moment on the album: if we spend our lives running away, we'll never make anything better. Now that's a depressing thought.



*Bang! Records put out Blowin' Your Mind! without his consent and sent Morrison scurrying to Warner Bros. in the wake of its hasty release and its forced marketing to the drug crowd of '67 (though I would have liked to have seen the faces of the flower children who took to the stupid psychedelic cover and brought it home expecting trippy goodness, only to be met by the directness of "T.B. Sheets").

The Rolling Stones — Exile on Main St.

There are those who contend that Exile on Main St., the Rolling Stones' most-lauded album (albeit only in retrospect), works better as an idea than an album. I agree, but I also think that's what cements it as the band's masterpiece. To be sure, there's nothing on the album as good as "Gimme Shelter," "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Brown Sugar," to say nothing of the rest of the group's three better-constructed albums. What Exile does primarily is capture a feeling; it just so happens that this feeling contains the whole of rock 'n roll, from its attitude (the down 'n out rebel/aristocratic celebrity dichotomy) to its musical roots (R&B, rockabilly, C&W, soul and blues).

The band recorded the double island while hiding from tax collectors in the south of France in Keith Richards' luxurious villa, hardly the makings for a return to the humble origins of rock. But as fancy as their exile was, it was still exile, and the Stones were still at the time dealing with the ghost of Altamont (Sticky Fingers began this journey with its nightmarish tunes "Sister Morphine" and "Dead Flowers"). Freed from their old label and left to their own devices out in the Riviera, the Stones devolved to levels of bacchanalian excess impressive even for them; the legacy of Exile owes as much to the photographs of Dominique Tarlé, who documented their lascivious orgy in stark, black-and-white clarity.

Sorting out who even played on the album can be tricky, with producer Jimmy Miller filling in for Charlie Watts behind the kit on "Happy" and "Shine a Light" and damn near everyone but Bill Wyman playing bass throughout. Truth is, little of the album was definitively cut with the band's mobile in Nellcôte, but those images are so tied to the sound of the album and the shoddy disrepair with which the group cobbled together these cuts that we may as well just print the legend. After all, despite "Let's Spend the Night Together" and the Altamont debacle, it was Tarlé's visualization of Exile that serves as the modern bedrock of the cultural perception of the Rolling Stones as one gigantic, cocaine-snorting nostril sniffing its way up a Colombian Everest. Somewhat amusingly, those photos may be the reason for Exile's reputation over the actual album, which contains only a few tunes ready for easy radio play, an anomaly for a band now synonymous with classic rock, who enjoy more than a baker's dozen of tracks that receive consistent airplay today. How could their "best" album seemingly contain no hits?

No one thinks this at first, of course, not in the face of the one-two punch of "Rocks Off" and "Rip This Joint." Even the newly remastered edition, a powerhouse update that brings out the bass and scrubs the tracks without cleaning them, the murkiness of the Stones' intriguingly sloppy, incoherent and flailing rockers remains fortunately intact. "Rocks Off," dominated mainly by Jim Price and Bobby Keys' brass as vocals and other instruments fade in and out of fuzzy distortion, sets the tone for an album whose tone is anything but assuredly set, the raucousness of the trumpets belying its desperate lyrics recounting Richards' need to get high just to numb himself from the world. Yeah, these guys are partying hard, but the comedown in just on the horizon, and they cannot outrun it. Even the haphazard production values capture this dichotomy, both the result of all them being too smacked up and distracted to put in hard work even as the fuzziness reflects a certain fatigue.

"Rip This Joint," meanwhile, establishes the aesthetic of this loose and disjointed album, ironically in its tautest number. Just under two and a half minutes, "Rip This Joint" runs the gamut of American rock and its roots, running through country, R&B, even New Orleans jazz. Its exaggerated speed, far faster than anything recorded by Holly or Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis, serves to literalize the exuberance of early rock 'n' roll and its effect on youth. Hell, it even points to future movements in the genre, prefiguring as it does hardcore punk in its incomprehensible wash of guitars.

Both of these opening numbers are tight enough to hook the listener, yet loose and ramshackle enough to prepare him or her for what's about to come. The one-two punch gives way to a loose collection of sounds and snatches of lyrics sufficiently hopeful and despairing to make the case for this album, by a bunch of nouveau riche Brits lounging in a stew of heroin and nubile, willing flesh, standing as perhaps the singular collection of the American songbook. In those opening numbers is the sound of musical independence, the Stones' escape from taxation and their old label lining up to the country's true birth, and both contain the undercurrent of uncertainty and fear that such shifts engender even in the most committed radicals. As the album moves into "Shake Your Hips" and "Casino Boogie," this doubt rises fully to the surface, as the old party mood fades into a perfunctory motion, the revolutionary fervor having cooled into the realization of the burden that comes with freedom.

Oh, but let us move away from this fleeting and tenuous connection, as are far too self-absorbed to belabor something as grand as a historical connection. The lyrics of Exile on Main St. in nearly every case refer to the band, even when they filter a song's perspective through an imaginary protagonist. Exile simply happens to be more resonant than even the sharpshooter accuracy of Jagger and Richards on their previous handful of albums because the band scrambles together the issues weighing on them. "Torn and Frayed," a country-soul mash-up that comes so close to the level of pioneering country/rock crossover artist Gram Parsons that you wonder if Parsons (who visited the band during recording) felt a bit of pressure, could be about either Brian Jones, the Stones' original lead guitarist who'd died of an overdose in 1969, or Keith Richards, who seemed at the time to be heading to an early grave of his own. The unnamed guitarist's state of being, synecdochically defined by his almost Dickensian "torn and frayed" coat, crumbles, but no one cares. "Well his coat is torn and frayed/It`s seen much better days./Just as long as the guitar plays/Let it steal your heart away," Jagger sings as if preparing himself to replace Keith's cold, vomit-choked corpse in a year or two. "Shine a Light," influenced more by the gospel roots of American music, serves as a more touching tribute to Jones. Originally written before Jones' death but with the band's knowledge of his growing addiction, the later-refashioned "Shine a Light" plays both in the moment and in retrospect, describing the band's reaction as their friend drifted away with the added pain of knowing the ultimate result.

What I noticed with Exile after my first listens years ago is that its supposed sprawling nature has been vastly overstated. At less than 70 minutes long, the Exile doesn't even make the most of its double-album format, which could have packed another 15 minutes worth of material (whcih, considering how only one song makes it to the five-minute mark, could have allowed for up to five more songs to make the cut). Furthermore, its pacing moves quite deliberately through its musical hodgepodge. Each side follows a loose structure of vibe and roots music explored, from the proto-R&B shuffles of the first side to the desperate soul of the third. Amazingly, the Stones, regarded to that point (and beyond) by detractors as blatant thieves of Afro-American style, sound not at all like copycats in the various modes of Exile; in every case, this band sounds as if they'd been born to play whatever is currently falling out of their poorly recorded instruments. Most of the band's previous forays into country, save the masterful "Wild Horses," typically showed a group about as far out of their comfort zone as they were peddling psychedelia in the Summer of Love via Their Satanic Majesties Request (more so, even, as that underrated album still hasn't had its fair shake despite its issues, especially in the much punchier mono edition floating out there in the ether). Give one listen to Side Two's "Torn and Frayed" or the moving "Sweet Virginia," however, and you'll hear a band that could have backed Gram Parsons any day.

Side Three showcases a band who made their reputation by posing as bad boys now becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. "Happy" presents Keith Richards on guitars and vocals and Jimmy Miller on drums as the invincible drug hound rallies from his stupor long enough to express pride of it before slipping back into his lethargic daze, and the excellent but sadly named "Turd on the Run" is a better soundtrack for getting into a drunken brawl than "Street Fighting Man." However, the third side also shows the group retreating slightly in the face of becoming what had previously been just an act. Both the murky, folksy, downright swampy "I Just Want to See His Face," which boasts one of Jagger's most distinct and affecting vocals performances ever, and "Let It Loose" draw deeply and, more importantly, convincingly from gospel and soul, imbuing the record with a genuine pleading not expected from the preening rockers. Not since the rampant fear of "Gimme Shelter" had the band sounded so fragile and unsure.

Nothing compares to "Ventilator Blues," however. Taking its name and mood from the sweltering, airless basement where the band recorded while at Richards' villa, "Ventilator Blues" captures the Rolling Stones at an emotional nadir, the uncomfortable heat of the location bringing out their bad side. Without referencing either Jones or Altamont, the song's lyrics describe a scene every bit as apocalyptic as that of "Gimme Shelter," only this cataclysm is insular and seedy, not spread out over a planet in trouble. In that sense, it captures why Altamont, which the Stones barely planned (as can be seen in the documentary Gimme Shelter), has become the symbol of the death of the counterculture, as it casts aside social concerns in favor of the entitled preoccupations that defined the Me Decade. However, as Mick spits out his double-tracked vocals like a man confessing to his priest that he's about to kill someone, Jagger finally becomes a true bluesman. Few would jump out of their seats to rush to Jagger's side and defend his vocal abilities, but people always sold him short. He didn't try to ape Delta bluesmen because he thought they were cool; he deeply loved Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf and all the others. His raspy whine is merely the result of his coming to terms with the fact that, hard as he may try, he will always be a white Englishman. It's an aural compromise between the eternal flame of race music and the technical crunch of white noise -- incidentally a compromise that extends to the entire band on the album's most well-known track, the distorted reggae of "Tumbling Dice." But his singing on "Ventilator Blues," combined with the sinister, choked nature of the instrumentation, works as a better and more convincing blues tune than the group's cover of "Stop Breaking Down" by the King of the Delta Blues himself, Robert Johnson found on Side Four.

If the plaintive country of Side Two and the dangerous and desperate soul of Side Three wore you down, never fear, for the Stones end their excavation of America's musical roots with good ol' rocking blues on and above the level they mastered in the mid-'60s. "All Down the Line" and that Johnson cover are stomping numbers that get the blood pumping after the one-two-three punch of "Ventilator Blues," "I Just Want to See His Face" and "Let It Loose" froze it. The aforementioned "Shine a Light" brings the mood back down, but it's fitting for a benediction to come at the end. At last, the Stones sum up the experience of the album itself with "Soul Survivor," a mid-tempo number that releases the battered and bewildered listener back into the real world.

"Everybody needs a little help sometimes," Jagger sings on "Tumbling Dice," and the central contradiction among the album's many contrasts is how much that's true and false of the band at this stage in their career. Cobbled together with anyone who was on-hand to play, Exile on Main St. perversely sounds like a group effort despite how much of it owes to Bobby Miller and Bobby Keys (his sax makes everything better). Hell, Mick Taylor, Jones' replacement, who despite his his contribution to Sticky Fingers might as well have been a hired hand at the time, provides the most solid anchor for the band's loose experimentation. By far the most technically proficient musician to ever play for the band, Taylor played honest, emotional blues through the flair of a jazzbo. His fluidity powers a number of songs through what might otherwise have been stagnant, scattered jams, most notably on "Ventilator Blues," where his slick slide guitar riff earned him a rare joint credit with the Glimmer Twins. (Taylor's full talent was best on-display live, particularly in the widely-circulated bootleg of the band's 1973 show in Brussels on the Goats Head Soup tour, a show heavy on Exile material. The entire bootleg is essentially one long, invigorating guitar solo, and I suspect that the band never released the scorching album officially because it would have been the best advertisement in the world for Talyor's solo career when he suddenly and acrimoniously split from the band.) And yet, in the middle of it all are Jagger and Richards, still capable of pulling themselves away from their vices to write some of the best tunes of all time. No other record so convincingly runs through as many genres as Exile without forcing itself to cover genres too-disparate to allow consistent flow, something this album contains even with its clashing moods and styles.

Perhaps what makes the record most special, however, is that it shows the band caring more about the music than their image, something they rarely did before and have never done since. After Exile met with mixed reviews and Richards slipped further into his addiction, Jagger, the professionally minded one of the bunch, began to assert more control and threw the band at every fad that might lengthen the Stones' career. Not until 1981's Tattoo You would they put out a great record from start to finish that sounded like a band making music they believed in instead of cashing in on trends. I have not always, or even often, made it through Exile on Main St. in one sitting, yet whenever I have been away from the Rolling Stones for any length of time, for some reason it is always this album that brings me back to them. Of course, when I do listen to it, the reason becomes obvious: the band most routinely singled out as bourgeois poseurs, even above Led Zeppelin, managed to make the rock record about rock, in all its contradictions and contrasts.


The remastered deluxe edition of the album is by far the best edition of the album to date, cleaning up the shoddy production while retaining its intentionally muddiness. What's a particular treat, however (and especially for those who've triple-dipped by now), is a bonus disc of alternate takes, as well as archived tracks partially re-recorded by the band, including work from departed Stones Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor. You can understand why these didn't make the final cut, but the "new" tracks "Plundered My Soul" and "I'm Not Signifying" are the best thing the band has put out since Tattoo You, and some of the alternate takes are dynamite. The scrapped version of "Loving Cup" contrasts with the tight version found on the album proper with a far looser structure, the metaphorically intoxicated innuendo of the album cut swapped out for a literal drunken swagger. This alternate take is better than the one that made the album, and in many ways it captures the album's overall mood of a deflated party better than any one track on the record (for a more in-depth look at this curious case, check out Ben Ratliff's fascinating view on it for the New York Times in an otherwise mixed re-appraisal of the album as a whole). Also worth more than a few spins is a considerably more defiant edition of "Soul Survivor," sung by Richards with feral menace that contrasts with his more enticing outlaw tone on "Happy." The remaster itself justifies buying whatever numbered copy of the album you're on, but these bonus cuts, while not nearly as comprehensive as they might have been, are fantastic and more-than-welcome additions.