Colin bought a record player.
A South East Minneapolis hipster with a career in the creative arts, no children and the disposable income to prove it, bought a record player. Front page news.
Stop the presses! Stop the presses everyone!
“White, Twin Cities, bearded hetero 30-something buys record player” is the new headline.
Photo by @imakopp
I recently got to hear Colin’s new record player one evening – masked, for only a song – as the spring air held onto winter outside.
For those wondering it’s a Debut Carbon EVO table that pours through a Cambridge Audio AXR85 receiver to two Bose 501 series 1 speakers. His dad’s speakers, originals from the 70’s.
We talked about the dreams for music we still shared, now, in the beginning of our late 30s – “beginning of our late 30s” a phrase that couldn’t be more rife with the reluctance of aging – as Van Morrison wailed softly in the background.I shall drive my chariots behind your streets and cry.
We both grew up amidst our father’s record collections.
His: hundreds of vinyls stacked in boxes in his shag-carpet basement room, mine: hundreds of CDs in drawers and a double deck tape player used to build countless mixtapes. My dad is always keeping up with technology, almost as an affront to his generation.
Colin and I stood 6 feet apart in the middle of his Montana inspired, mid-century modern living room and wished aloud for the future of our own collections.
“Just…all the best”, Colin said.
I’m not sure I’ve agreed more strongly with anything anyone has ever said.
A collection of your absolute favorite albums, all in big cardboard sleeves, filling up an entire wall of a room, there for you to stand or sit in front of? Two big speakers at whose imagined intersection you can position yourself and look at as you listen to them? Any time you want? Sounds like heaven.
Colin said his wife, (Ellen, decorator of said living room) would fall asleep on their couch only to wake to him standing behind her, looking at the record player while listening to it. “What on earth are you doing?” she would question, rubbing her eyes out of their sleepiness.
Our conversation, at once nostalgic and teen-like in its optimism for the future, got me re-thinking about the best albums of my life, and what they meant to me. In some ways, I think that’s all I’m really qualified to write about.
It also got me slightly thinking about the way men collect the things we love so we can line them up in rows and point at them. And how these collectible things are often the obsessions of our youth.
What is a vinyl record collection but action figures for music nerds?
But what our conversation mostly got me thinking about was how we separate our Favorite albums, from the Most Important albums, and how the Best albums in a genre might be so good they aren’t exactly the most Influential albums because no one can imitate them.
Like how the Bubba Sparxxx album Deliverance is one of my favorite albums because of where I was in my life at the time it was released, but if I were to list the most important album that was also one of my favorite albums that came out at the same time as Bubba Sparxxx Deliverance I would have to say College Dropout.
And yet, if you look at the most Influential hip hop album to come out in that period you could argue it was Get Rich or Die Tryin’.
Once you start slicing and dicing these criteria you start to notice albums that stand out, even among the Most Important. You start to see that the albums that surround an artist’s Most Definitive album aren’t actually that similar, and that maybe the Definitive albums isn’t really all that definitive of the artist.
In my case I wrote list after list after list until eventually I found…
Four of My Favorite Albums That Are Also Among The Most Important of All-Time And That Also Invented and Defined A Genre So Completely They Completed That Genre And No One Ever Did That Thing Again Including Them
Now, in the headline of this article I used the term “abandoned”, but that’s a little harsh. I think what may be closer to the truth is something like this section’s header, which doesn’t read as well on a timeline.
These are albums that are genres unto themselves, whose artist’s may or may not have purposefully avoided recreating them.
Album: For Emma, Forever Ago
Genre Invented: Ethereal Midwest Acoustic Guitar Soul
I’ve previously written about the “Influence of Justin Vernon” but no artist influenced by Justin Vernon really got close to what Vernon achieved with Bon Iver on Emma. He led us to the woods and howled, he sat us down by the fire and cooed. He coded it all with just enough poetry as to make the lyrics as hazy as the production. For Emma is a beautiful fog, a haunting midwest hillside that could also be Ireland, or the Appalachians, or the Dolemites. It’s a Wisconsin cabin and nothing like any Wisconsin cabin I’ve been to.
When Bruce Hornsby said Justin Vernon was a “soul singer who creates these unique and beautiful sonic landscapes on which to perform”, he was right. That soul, that emotion is what makes Emma so satisfying, even a decade plus after its release. That emotion is why Kanye pulled him into MBDTF. Why Taylor Swift tapped him for the best track on Folklore.
With Bon Iver’s follow-up, self-titled album the band succeeded in many ways by changing what they had done on their breakout effort. It was a success, critically and musically (do we really want what we’ve already had?). But it wasn’t For Emma. Except for “Halocene”, of course.
Album: Astral Weeks
Genre Invented: Irish Jazz Soul Poetry
Astral Weeks – like For Emma, Forever Ago or Illmatic – is a debut album. It exists in a landscape Van Morrison had never ventured into with his band Them (“Here Comes The Night”) and it wound a path down that he would never follow as deeply again.
Reading the story of how my favorite album of all-time was made is unreal. Especially when compared to today’s highly processed, highly produced musical landscape.
Astral Weeks producer Lewis Merenstein brought in jazz veterans: bassist and band lead for the sessions Richard Davis (played with Eric Dolphy), guitarist Jay Berliner (with Mingus), percussionist Warren Smith Jr. (with Max Roach), drummer Connie Kay (with everyone).
Van didn’t really talk to them. “I don’t think he ever introduced himself to us, nor we to him“.
There was no music.
“We were used to playing to charts, but Van just played us the songs on his guitar and then told us to go ahead and play exactly what we felt.”
On one night they recorded 4 songs that made the album.
I’m no Van Morrison, but for those unfamiliar with the recording process, it’s ridiculous to think you could record 4 release-worthy songs in one day.
Listening to Astral Weeks feels like the way Davis describes one session,
There was a “certain feel about a seven-to-ten o’ clock session” and that “the ambience of that time of day was all through everything we played”
That’s what Astral Weeks is: it’s the sun setting on the railroad tracks, it’s that “cherry, cherry wine”, it’s the golden hour hitting a field of barley, it’s watching it all from the front seat of your ’67 Chevelle.
It’s jazz interpretations of an Irishman’s soul-folk-rock-pop acoustic guitar songs.
Listening to Morrison’s similarly flawless, but in no-other-ways-similar follow-up to Astral Weeks, Moondance is just further proof that Astral Weeks was a moment in time. A moment that took place between 7pm and Midnight, over 3 nights in 1967.
Album: Illmatic
Genre Defined: Early 90s Queensbridge Street Poetry Hip Hop
You think there’s a lot of albums like Illmatic. It’s boom-bap, it’s early-90s New York, it’s gritty.
But there really aren’t.
While Nas certainly had a lot of competition, Ready To Die and 36 Chambers could be said to be the analogous albums for their respective boroughs in that time period, neither are as concise as Illmatic. Both waver slightly along their paths (“Juicy” doesn’t sound like the rest of Ready To Die. And Illmatic never spends 70 seconds shouting out everyone RZA knows, like the intro to “Clan In Da Front” does.)
Illmatic is almost depressingly good.
For anyone whose ever tried to rap, Illmatic is depressing for the effortlessness with which Nas deploys his complex flow, and for everyone else, it’s depressing for how successfully absorbs the mental of its listeners.
I am someone who is really effected by what I’ve just listened to or just watched. I get pulled into world’s pretty swiftly. And Illmatic is so absorbing, by the end I’m reaching for the bupropion rapping, “life’s a bitch, and then you die, that’s why we get high, cuz you never know, when you’re gonna go”.
That lyric may sound like the nihilistic musings of a 20-year-old who grew up in one of America’s largest housing projects but it, along with all of Illmatic, bring Queens 1993 to life like no other album has. It’s a complete encapsulation of a time and place, elevated, like the 7 train out of queens.
I don’t know what riding the subway in New York City in the early 90’s was like but because of the chorus of Illmatic’s “Ain’t Hard To Tell” I know what it sounds like.
Illmatic is tight and precise in a way that defines the other 3 albums in this section: all of them under 10 songs. (As Nas told Fuse in 2012 “the intro makes it read as 10, but it’s only 9 song”.)
While his sophomore album It Was Written contains what might be my favorite Nas track of all-time (“The Message”), it also had the production that Illmatic’s success could afford Nas. It has a few choruses that were remakes of other successful songs (“Street Dreams”, “If I Ruled The World”), it has funk-guitar riffs. It is bouncier, cleaner, and more commercially successful than Illmatic. Everything hip hop hated in the early 90s, lol.
Album: Kind of Blue
Genre Defined: Modal Jazz
You’re probably thinking that some of the “genres” I’ve assigned to these classic albums aren’t exactly genres. I would argue that we think of genre a little too broadly, and that our favorite albums are our favorites because they embody a sound and moment that has never existed again.
Miles Davis may be the only person to think of Kind of Blue as a sound and moment that never existed again. Many jazz musicians spent their careers chasing that sound, but not Miles. After Kind of Blue he made Sketches of Spain which is a soundtrack to a spaghetti western that never existed and an album that takes 5 minutes for the music to even start.
“So What” or Kind of Blue, they were done in that era, the right hour, the right day, and it happened. It’s over …. What I used to play with Bill Evans, all those different modes, and substitute chords, we had the energy then and we liked it. But I have no feel for it anymore—it’s more like warmed-over turkey
Interview with Ben Sidran, 1986
With Kind of Blue Miles left hard-bop behind, and slowed down to take a breath. Right as the world started slowing down, he was off in an another direction, daring bulls to run towards his waving red flags.
P.S. Is there anyone in music more intimidating to write about than Miles Davis? The man doesn’t even like his own music.
I’m Dynamite And I Don’t Know Why
Here are three runner-ups.
Albums that I thought I was going to write about, but then realized they were part of a slightly larger sound project.
Enter The Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) more often called 36 Chambers is probably my favorite hip hop album of all-time.
It is my favorite in the way some albums give you no choice: I listened to it back to front every day to and from high school for at least a year straight. I still remember the day I picked it out of the bins at The Exclusive Company.
No album I listen to now can compete with the albums I listened to endlessly in high school.
I wanted to include 36 Chambers in the above section but realized it is actually part of a 4-album project that defined this sound, this genre we could call: 90s new-school kung-fu statten island soul-fused boom bap.
The 4 albums that define this genre are, first, the groups debut (36 Chambers) and then, 3 of the 5 Wu-Tang solo albums that followed 36 Chambers but preceded the groups sophomore album Forever.
Those albums are:
- Ironman
- Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
- Liquid Swords
Sure, Method Man’sTical and ODB’s Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version, produced the groups biggest solo-hits at the time, but the three albums I bullet-pointed (the solo albums of Ghostface, Raekwon, and GZA) felt the most analogous to the original 36 Chambers.
Together they build a universe that I’ve probably never left musically.
A world where kung-fu samples meet Scarface quotes (“I told you a LONG time ago…”), where swords are metaphorical and guns are literal, where wordplay is prized, and poetry elevated the life on early-90s New York streets. Early Wu-Tang stimulated my brain with a tantalizing mix of imagery, that for me, is on par with “Howl“.
I bolded some lines from “Criminology” to highlight the wide range of influences I’m talking about, lyrical metaphors that touch on the military, kung fu, the Five Percenters, the violence of America’s poorest neighborhoods.
Yo, first of all son, peep the arson
Many brothers I be sparkin’ and bustin’ mad light inside the dark
Call me dough snatcher, just the brother for the rapture
I hand glide, holdin’ on strong, hard to capture
Extravagant, RZA bake the track and it’s militant
Then I react, like a convict, and start killin’ shit
It’s manifested, the Gods work like appliances
Dealin’ in my cypher I revolve around sciences
The 9th chamber, leave you trapped inside my hallway
You try to flee but you got smoked up by the doorway (blaow! blaow! blaow!)
Or how about this lyric from “Knuckleheadz”. The breadth of references here are unreal.
Lay on the crime scene, sipping fine wines, pulling nines on
Genius
UFOs, taking they fly clothes, they eyes closed
We getting loot, no doubt, check the word of mouth
Unheard about, guns go off and now a murder route
I’m out, my raps play the part like a Get Smart secret agent
In a maze and style’s blazing
Johnny Blaze and Tony Starks in the Days Inn
And Rhyming, my nigga Lou Diamond with Robert F
We like Meth to go and fuck with Noodles
Having them poodles on the lockdown, buying me
Amarettos and chewables, smacking pharmaceutical
Rap niggas on dust and woos
This world of swirling smoke, blunts laced with cocaine, UFOs, action films, gangster nicknames, and expensive liquors is as intoxicating as it is addictive.
I just don’t get this feeling from any other music in the world, this feeling that these 4 Wu-Tang albums provide, all produced and directed by The RZA. They are a universe unto themselves.
Now, for an abrupt segue into early-70’s rock.
After Harvest Neil Young threw it all away.
Harvest can be seen as part of a project that covers the first few Young solo albums, and, if looking for an overview of all of them at once, I highly recommend Live at Massey Hall if not only for “Dance, Dance, Dance” and to hear the soon-to-be Harvest classics get no reaction from their opening chords, but because the live album feels like a good summary of the project that Harvest ended: soft and plaintive, heart-on-your-sleeve folk rock that Young wanted nothing to do with after the otherworldly success of Harvest.
The 3 albums that followed Harvest are called “The Ditch Trilogy” not just for their lo-fi, pre-punk rock rawness, but because Neil Young literally said that the success of Harvest “put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch. A rougher ride but I saw more interesting people there.”
Much like the way Van Morrison, Bon Iver, or Nas never recaptured the feel of their debut albums (not that they did, nor should have, tried to) – but more like the way Miles Davis disregarded Kind of Blue – Young didn’t like where Harvest had taken him, so not only did he not try to duplicate it, he tried to destroy it.
If Neil Young helped define the music of the late-60s hippie movement, Harvest was his needle-in-the-arm end of an era, after which like much of that hippie movement, he too turned towards the darker side of his impulses in the later 70s.
And now, for an abrupt segueinto late 90s, live-instrumentation hip hop.
Things Fall Apart almost created its own genre.
But it’s so wrapped up in the Soulquarians projects (at one point in the late 90’s the Soulquarian projects booked up the entirety of Electric Lady studios), and so relatively similar to the two Roots albums preceding it, that it’s hard to say it is the beginning and end of its genre.
But it is the best and last Roots album of their first era. It is the best live-musician, minor-chord, Philly-not-New York, neo soul but rap focused hip hop album of all-time.
The Roots have always successfully defined and redefined themselves every few albums, creating eras. Things Fall Apart was the pinnacle of multi-mc Roots (shout out to Dice Raw), right as the band was reaching another level musically – when they still has Scott Storch on keys and Rahzel on mouth.
Did I mention Things Fall Apart has fucking D’angelo on keys? It also features Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Eve, Beanie Seagel, Common, Mos Def, and Spike Lee on vocal performances.
While the album after Things Fall Apart, Phrenology, saw the band successfully branching out in more decisive directions – that included bringing the Cody Chesnutt for the brilliant “Seed 2.0” – it doesn’t have the same cohesiveness, completeness as that still makes TFA sound like a world all its own.
In Conclusion
In conclusion, Colin bought a record player, I want a record player, and some albums contain universes.