Less Than Meets the Eye

A friend prompted us by example to list an noteworthy slab for every year of our lives. When one is under 20 is to make a lineage for your present taste. When as we are, you are over 50 the trick is different: it is to assemble something that still makes sense. So first the list, then some remarks.

1959	Blues and Roots	Charles Mingus
1960	This Is Our Music	Ornette Coleman
1961	Blues and the Abstract Truth	Oliver Nelson
1962	Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music	Ray Charles
1963	Live at the Apollo	James Brown
1964	Where Did Our Love Go	The Supremes
1965	A Love Supreme	John Coltrane
1966	The Exciting Wilson Pickett	Wilson Pickett
1967	I Never Loved a Man	Aretha Franklin
1968	The Promise of a Future	Hugh Masekela
1969	Stand!	Sly and the Family Stone
1970	Bitches Brew	Miles Davis
1971	What’s Going On?	Marvin Gaye
1972	Superfly	Curtis Mayfield
1973	Catch a Fire	Bob Marley & the Wailers
1974	Fullfillingness First Finale	Stevie Wonder
1975	Chocolate City	Parliament
1976	…Is It Something I Said?	Richard Pryor
1977	Bush Baby	Arthur Blythe
1978	Nice Guys	Art Ensemble of Chicago
1979	Off the Wall	Michael Jackson
1980	Dirty Mind	Prince
1981	Bass Culture	Linton Kwesi Johnson
1982	The Message	Grand Master Flash and the Furious Five
1983	Synchro System	King Sunny Adé and His African Beats
1984	Run D.M.C.	Run D.M.C.
1985	Seven Standards	Anthony Braxton
1986	When Colors Play	Ronald Shannon Jackson
1987	Introducing the Hardline According to…	Terence Trent D’Arby
1988	It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back	Public Enemy
1989	3 Feet High and Rising	De La Soul
1990	Sex Packets	Digital Underground
1991	The Low End Theory	A Tribe Called Quest
1992	The Chronic	Dr. Dre
1993	Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers)	Wu Tang Clan
1994	Illmatic	Nas
1995	Only Built 4 Cuban Links	Raekwon
1996	All Eyez on Me	Tupac Shakur
1997	Blu Blu Blu	Muhal Richard Abrams Orchestra
1998	The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill	Lauryn Hill
1999	Charlie Hustle	E-40
2000	Stankonia	Outkast
2001	The Blueprint	Jay-Z
2002	Missy Elliot	Under Construction
2003	Gwotet	David Murray and the Gwa Ko Masters
2004	Piracy Funds Terrorism	M.I.A.
2005	Run the Road	V.A.
2006	Fishscale	Ghostface Killah
2007	Underground Kingz	UGK
2008	Tha Carter III	Lil Wayne
2009	These Brings Us To	Henry Threadgill’s Zooid
2010	My Beautiful Dark Fantasy	Kanye West

We think of this as a pile of stones left by the roadside, a cairn that conjures way. It goes almost without saying that therefore it is of a moment, and would be different if we re-did it. That's the way of such things.

1.) The arbitrary rules:

a.) Hadda be an album, not a song, single or something else. That mattered on the long tails of this chart. In the early 60s and the present era the album has a more limited form than in the era of the LP or the CD. When the currency was measured in 7" or exchanged on u2b, the album is just a little less significant. Thus there are moments when choosing a single album was hard. In the 1965-2005 period because there were too many. In the 1959-1964 and 2006-2010 periods (the latter way more than the former, b/t/w), there were too few. Furthermore, given how we learn, and given the autobiographical nature of the list, the single means much to us. Our taste was shaped by hot singles, especially in 1967-1977, again in 1980-1985, and again in 2002-present.

b.) No repeat artists. Borrowed this from GG's list of songs in the second half of the 20th c. It came natural on this except in the case of Ornette Coleman, whose self reinvention really called for his name to be on the list again in the 90s.

c.) Autobiographical context mattered. We cared less about the greatness of the album (although that mattered) and more about whether we thinks it was great then and now. More below.

d.) There needed to be some thematic integrity to the list. We summoned the meaning of the list as we went, but it as we conjured the list gave us vision of where we were heading early on. We hesitate to call it coherence, but the meaning we made up speaks to our our aesthetic purpose. 'Gain, more below.

e.) No comps. No reissues. This neutralizes a number of significant autobiographical moments.

2.) Autobiographical:

The foundation stone in the chart is Nice Guys, an album that is second to us in many contexts, but first as we think of the rules above. It was our first contact w/ the AEC's "great black music, ancient to future" maxim. We realized that so much of our listening had already been in that tendency, and it became then, and again later, one organizing principle in what we sought to hear, and what we sought to learn.

Other albs stand out in this line:

What's Going On was our first real run in w/ Marvin. The full blown drama was there before, but when we heard the singles from this slab we fell in love with it: mashing soul, politics, sex, drugs, lying about drugs, strings and the groove, etc.

Bass Culture was our first realization that the pancarribean was transatlantic, and that the movement went both ways.

The Message made rap into an album game, and may be the only slab that comes close to breaking the comp rule.

This is Our Music came to us like punk rock, full of bluesbased opposition to the sound that came before it.

Bitches Brew was our first taste of conjuring, leading us to Tell My Horse, guiding our way as we try to find it. Thus, BB, like TMH, is for us when are lost, our amazing grace.

3 Feet High and Rising, which came so distinctly after so much hard sh*t, redefined what we thought of as street, just like De la Soul is Dead taught us about the real meaning of unnaground and Lazarussian movement that keeps us all alive.

Only Built 4 Cuban Links is the What's Going On of the second half of the list. We didn't even understand it until long after the release of Stankonia. It is still living up to the James Blood rule: "Jazz is the teacher. Funk is the preacher." The mess that makes WGO is all in OB4CL: mashing soul, politics, sex, drugs, lying about drugs, strings and the groove, etc. We also see this slab totally in the light of Nice Guys and the AEC rule cited above.

Piracy Funds Terrorism taught us that the AEC rule had gone global, that Chuck D was still working the dancehall, and that the blues was now the world's song form.

3.) Thematic

In the end, the devil is in the details that such a list obscures. The short version (which is unfair to all that is omitted and true only in its abstraction from the devilish context we love the most) is simple: the blues endures like angels, and the full force of creolization can't stop and won't stop. Dang diggy dang ma kingz and queenz.