Monthly Report: March 2024 Singles

Monday, March 18, 2024

 





1. BigXthaPlug - "MMHMM"
Tennessee's Bandplay has been one of my favorite southern rap producers of the last few years for his work with Young Dolph and Key Glock. And it's cool to see him branch out with more artists from other areas, I love the way he flipped the Whispers sample on the breakout hit by Dallas rapper BigXthaPlug. Here's the 2024 singles Spotify playlist I add songs to every month. 

2. Key Glock - "Let's Go"
Key Glock has been on a trajectory of making bigger and better solo music since Dolph died, happy to see him thriving even without his mentor. There's been some great "Let's Go" memes out there. 
https://twitter.com/RapAllStars/status/1750550213905768918

3. 21 Savage - "Redrum"
Using the backwards version of the word "murder" from The Shining is a brilliant workaround for making a radio song about killing people. I kind of hate the part at the end where someone is reciting a few of Jack Nicholson's lines from the movie, though -- it's actually Usher, as confirmed by 21 Savage's manager, though, which is hilarious. 

4. Pearl Jam - "Dark Matter"
After more than 30 years, I still get a little twinge of the excitement I felt as a kid when Pearl Jam released the first single from a new album. Very often they've subverted expectations with lead singles that are slower (or faster) than their biggest hits, but "Dark Matter" is a little closer to their comfort zone, it reminds me a bit of the more aggressive songs on Vs with some of the gnarlier guitar tones Mike McCready has favored in recent decades. I'm not surprised to see that it's the band's first #1 on Billboard's Mainstream Rock chart since "Given To Fly."

5. Twice - "I Got You"
I always feel like I'm more into K-pop in theory than in practice, I just think an industry so focused on the most superficial bubblegum aspects of pop music should have more bops. Now and then, though, I stumble across a song that really appeals to me, and "I Got You" unsurprisingly has American origins -- it was co-written by two members of the American boy band Why Don't We, probably originally intended for their group before they went on hiatus in 2022. 

6. Mariah The Scientist - "Out Of Luck"
Mariah The Scientist has a supporting role on the terrible Tee Grizzley/Chris Brown song that's on R&B radio constantly, it's kind of sad that that's the biggest hit she's ever been a part of. I really like the KAYTRANADA-produced solo track that's been getting spins lately, though. 

7. Carrie Underwood - "Out Of That Truck"
Carrie Underwood's most famous song is about bashing up her ex's truck, so I chuckle at the memory of "Before He Cheats" when I hear her sing a more bittersweet breakup song where she just tells her ex that everything about his truck is going to remind him of her. 

8. Loui f/ NLE Choppa - "No Distractions"
I liked Atlanta rapper Loui's single with Saweetie, "Talkin' About," from 2-3 years ago. Then I kinda forgot he existed, but he's got another good one with a very different vibe here. 

9. Miley Cyrus and Pharrell Williams - "Doctor (Work It Out)" 
A few weeks ago I made a Miley Cyrus deep cuts playlist, and talked about how I much I hated her Bangerz era compared to most of her other music. So imagine my surprise that she released a Bangerz outtake as the lead single to a new album, and I actually like it, easily more than the handful of other Miley/Pharrell songs that were released a decade ago. 

10. Luke Combs - "Where The Wild Things Are"
"Where The Wild Things Are" is the very good follow-up to Luke Combs's massively popular cover of "Fast Car." But it peaked at #3 on country radio, making it, weirdly, the least successful single of his career so far -- he's got sixteen #1s plus one song that peaked at #2. 

The Worst Single of the Month: Kanye West & Ty Dolla Sign f/ Rich The Kid and Playboi Carti - "Carnival" 
Before "Carnival" hit #1 on the Hot 100 last week, it'd been sixteen years since Kanye's last solo #1, twelve years since his last feature on a #1, and almost three years since his last production credit on a #1. Obviously he's done a lot to hasten his commercial decline, including being a horrible person aligned with all sorts of right wing idealogues, but there's still this passionate fanbase of Kanye believers, and they finally got him with a song that's repulsive on several levels. Rich The Kid, an Atlanta D-lister who hadn't been relevant since 2018, delivers a generic swag rap hook that's turned into a soccer chant by actual Italian soccer hooligans, Playboi Carti tries another "cool new voice" that circles back around to being just a Lil Yachty impression, and Kanye drops a bunch of embarrassing reactionary cancel culture bars, ending with some divorced dad grievances about his kids being in a school that is somehow more "fake" than Donda Academy. It sounds like Yeezus: Midlife Crisis Edition

Movie Diary

Friday, March 15, 2024


 























a) Dune: Part Two
I've never been big on Dune (I think I read half of it as a teenager) and I thought Villeneuve's first movie was fine. But my wife and I went to check out a matinee of Dune: Part Two last week and I thought it really lived up to the hype, fantastic movie. I thought Villeneuve chose a good way to break the story up into different movies, especially for Paul's story arc, because it just felt like Michael Corleone's transformation from the first Godfather movie to the second. I've been something of a Timothee Chalamet skeptic but he really rose to the occasion here and stood out in a movie full of great performances by Javier Bardem, Rebecca Ferguson, and Austin Butler, among others. 

b) Poor Things
I can understand how some people didn't enjoy this movie -- I found Yorgos Lanthimos's whole deal off-putting with The Lobster and especially The Killing of a Sacred Deer. But I loved Poor Things, it's probably my favorite of this year's Best Picture nominees, I was rooting for Lily Gladstone but I thought Emma Stone gave an incredibly strange and funny performance that deserved the awards it got, this movie probably would not have worked half as well with anyone else in that role. And the colors, the sets, the costumes, Willem Defoe's face, the whole thing was really fucked up and creative and stood out in a year that all its competitors were very good but far less bold or original. 

c) Damsel
This Netflix movie with Millie Bobby Brown turned the usual fantasy book trope of the damsel in distress on its head with a young woman rescuing herself from a bad situation. I found myself comparing it unfavorably to The Princess, a similarly themed Hulu movie from a couple years ago starring Joey King. But Damsel was pretty good too, I loved Shohreh Aghdashloo's creepy performance as the voice of the big CGI dragon. 

d) Leave The World Behind
I feel like Sam Esmail's first feature since creating "Mr. Robot" should've gotten more attention, or at least been a brief water cooler sensation like other Netflix apocalypse movies like Bird Box. Esmail is just so good at using carefully framed shots and reveals to build tension, Leave The World Behind felt very Hitchcockian, and Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali were great as these very different people thrown into a scary situation where they had to trust each other. It also felt a lot more true to the confusion we'd feel if some kind of huge societal collapse did happen,

e) Bottoms
I called Shiva Baby my favorite movie of the decade so far, so I was excited to see Emma Seligman and Rachel Sennott's next collaboration. I thought Bottoms was just good and not great, but as a deliberately silly comedy, maybe it would grow on me on a second or third watch. One of Ayo Edebiri's funniest performances and Ruby Cruz was a great scene stealer, there were just a lot of moments where it felt like they were throwing kind of predictable gags at the wall. 

f) Cat Person
Kristen Roupenian's 2017 New Yorker story Cat Person was one of those rare moments where a piece of short fiction briefly gripped the world, or at least a certain corner of the internet, and it wasn't surprising to see it get adapted into a movie. I always feel like short stories are a little underrated as a medium, and in many cases would make better source material for features than novels. That said, Cat Person is one of the most worthless movies I've ever seen, like I can't imagine anyone who'd read and enjoyed the story thought they did a good job with it, and for people that hadn't read it, it probably seemed like a really hapless, vaguely pointless, tonally inconsistent movie. The strength of the story was that it was a well written slice of life about a young woman's awkward experience dating a slightly older man, getting weird vibes, and breaking it off (he claims to have cats, but when she goes to his house, there are no cats). The story ends with the guy sending a few mean, accusatory texts, ending with him saying simply, "Whore." The movie, however, goes on for about a half hour after that, with a violent confrontation and a house fire, trying to turn the whole thing into a psychological thriller, and it's just embarrassing. I get that the original story only had a couple of characters and not a lot of actual scenes, but it just felt like they padded the whole thing out with so many unnecessary supporting characters and over-the-top moments. The guy doesn't just not have cats, he has a dog! Gasp! 

g) Nimona
I hadn't heard of this movie until it was nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars, and I put it on last weekend and my 8-year-old and I just loved it, such a fun, funny movie with a really unique animation style. Apparently Blue Sky Studios of Ice Age and Rio fame was making Nimona a few years ago when Disney bought the studio and then shut it down, so the movie was completely canceled for a year until another studio revived it and it was released on Netflix, so it's just an amazing feelgood story that it even got made, let alone got an Oscar nomination. 

h) Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom
The first one was fun if by no means a masterpiece, I hoped the sequel would at least be entertaining but it just felt wrong all the way down. Patrick Wilson was a good antagonist for the first movie but when the brothers team up and it becomes a reluctant buddy comedy in The Lost Kingdom, it just doesn't work, Wilson's not funny, no chemistry there.

i) The Greatest Love Story Never Told
Jennifer Lopez recently went on a publicity blitz for her first album in a decade, with a 'visual album'-style film of the album, a making-of documentary, and a streaming concert special. The album is actually alright, I thought she was just starting to get good at making albums on 2014's A.K.A., but the documentary is actually pretty interesting, JLo very earnestly admitting that nobody is clamoring for a new album from her, but she had this passion project she wanted to make, and so she puts her own money into this big expensive thing. The Bennifer spectacle made them both seem less likeable at the time, but now that they've reunited and married 20 years later, it's kind of sweet and poignant, Affleck seems a little bewildered to be in the documentary but very loving and supportive about the project, they have some really funny candid scenes in this. 

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

 






I ranked Soundgarden's albums for Spin

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 351: World Party

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

 





A few months ago, I was driving one afternoon and a World Party song came on the radio and I was like "oh right! World Party! they're awesome! I should make a deep cuts playlist of them!" and made a mental note of it. But I hadn't gotten around to it yet, and then on Monday, the news broke that Karl Wallinger had passed away at the age of 66, which sent me diving into their music again. 

World Party album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. World Party
2. It Can Be Beautiful (Sometimes)
3. It's All Mine
4. Hawaiian Island World
5. Sweet Soul Dream
6. Love Street
7. When The Rainbow Comes
8. And I Fell Back Alone
9. What Is Love All About?
10. Sunshine
11. Hollywood
12. Piece Of Mind
13. Vanity Fair
14. Always
15. It Is Time
16. Who Are You?
17. I Thought You Were A Spy
18. I Want To Be Free
19. Waiting Such A Long Long Time

Tracks 1, 2, 3 and 4 from Private Revolution (1987)
Tracks 5, 6, 7 and 8 from Goodbye Jumbo (1990)
Tracks 9, 10 and 11 from Bang! (1993)
Tracks 12, 13, 14 and 15 from Egyptology (1997)
Tracks 16 and 17 from Dumbing Up (2000)
Tracks 18 and 19 from Arkeology (2012)

My first memory of World Party is my brother and I seeing the video for "Call Me Up" in 1997 and my brother buying Egyptology soon after (it's very possible I'd heard "Way Down Now" or something before that and didn't know who it was by). That was right around the time I was starting to shake off being a grunge kid and develop a deep appreciation for power pop and piano-based bands like Ben Folds Five and music that sounds like the Beatles, including the Beatles, so that was really the right time for me to hear World Party. Two years later, we heard the Robbie Williams cover of the Egyptology track "She's The One," which hit #1 in the UK. World Party member Guy Chambers was a frequent collaborator with Williams, so I always assumed it was a friendly, mutually beneficial thing that Williams made a World Party song into a pop hit, but apparently Wallinger didn't know about the cover until it was out, and was always irritated about it (and Williams casually claiming in concert that he wrote the song himself). 

Eventually I reached back and heard Goodbye Jumbo and other World Party records and kind of realized that that's the stuff the band was primarily known for, not Egyptology, which is still the album I know the best, although I think the first four albums are all on a pretty equal level of quality. I also really like the band Wallinger played in before founding World Party, The Waterboys. And I've come to be really fond of that '80s/early '90s moment of '60s nostalgia, World Party may have been the most Beatles-obsessed band in England in the years before Oasis showed up (World Party drummer Chris Sharrock later toured with Oasis, as it happens). 

Wallinger worked with Sinead O'Connor before her rise to fame -- she sang backing vocals on a few World Party songs, including "Hawaiian Island World" and "Sweet Soul Dream," and Wallinger arranged O'Connor's classic "Black Boys On Mopeds." Wallinger was the musical director for Reality Bites, and I always really liked the World Party song on the soundtrack, "When You Come Back To Me." So it's annoying that it's one of the few songs on the soundtrack album that isn't currently available on Spotify. 

The 5th and final proper World Party album Dumbing Up was released in 2000, and Wallinger later revealed that he'd suffered a brain aneurysm in 2001. After a few years of recovery, though, Wallinger did return to touring with World Party, and also worked on the 2008 project Big Blue Ball with Peter Gabriel. World Party's 2012 box set Arkeology featured five discs of rarities and archival material as well as a bunch of new studio songs, and that's pretty much the last music we got from World Party. I wasn't shocked to hear of Wallinger's death considering what he's been through, but I hope he enjoyed his later years, he was a really great musician and songwriter. 

Monthly Report: February 2024 Albums

Monday, March 11, 2024



























1. Mary Timony - Untame The Tiger
Mary Timony is a "real heads know" indie rock legend who never really got the credit she deserved for her work over the years. But it feels like she's started to get appreciated a little more thanks to her longevity, she's arguably gotten better and better with later records like The Shapes We Make, Ex Hex's It's Real, and now Untame The Tiger. I hear a lot of Television in this album on songs like "No Thirds" and "The Guest," albeit filtered through Timony's distinctive voice and guitar tone. Here's the 2024 albums Spotify playlist that I add new releases to throughout the year. 

2. J Mascis - What Do We Do Now
J Mascis is another indie rock lifer that I'm really glad is still making great music today. Most of Mascis's music is in the familiar Dinosaur Jr. roar, but some of his solo albums have been quiet acoustic albums. What Do We Do Now a little different because it's mainly uptempo rockers with drums, but the rhythm guitars are all acoustic, and then the leads are electric, and he breaks out all the crazy distortion pedal sounds for the solos. The combination surprised me at first, but it works, and Mascis is a fantastic drummer so I always like hearing him behind the kit. I think my favorite is "I Can't Find You," I love that twangy lead guitar on the chorus. 

3. Madi Diaz - Weird Faith
Madi Dias has been making albums for over a decade, but I only heard of her recently, she's been building momentum touring with Harry Styles and working with Kacey Musgraves, who appears on Weird Faith's "Don't Do Me Good." And the album grabbed me right from the first song, "Same Risk," she's got a great voice and some sharp lyrics. I don't always vibe with the newer generation of really self-aware confessional singer-songwriters, I roll my eyes a lot at the things the members of Boygenius write, but I like Diaz. I'm surprised "Girlfriend" wasn't one of the singles, that feels like a real standout track. "Kiss The Wall" is really catchy, too. 

4. Usher - Coming Home
The last time Usher released an album 8 years ago, Hard II Love staggered through a long, aimless promo campaign before finally landing awkwardly with cover art everyone hated and 3 days on Tidal before it was available everywhere else. By comparison, Usher had a great rollout for Coming Home, building momentum with the Tiny Desk Concert, the Vegas residency, radio hits, and then the Super Bowl halftime show the same weekend the album dropped. And yet, despite the very different optics, I think Coming Home and Hard II Love are pretty similar in quality and overall commercial performance, when you look at the lowered expectations for an aging R&B star. There are some minor irritating moments on Coming Home (The-Dream's cheesy lyrics on "Bop," the Billy Joel sample on "A-Town Girl") but there's a lot of great stuff too, from "I Love U" and "Please U" to "Kissing Strangers" and "Coming Home" 

5. Catherine Sikora and Susan Alcorn - Filament
Last year I met a musician I've admired for years and years, experimental pedal steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, to get a couple quotes from her for my High Zero Festival piece, and to profile her in a longer piece that will be in the first issue of a new zine called Rantipole later this year (I'll post here again when it's out). Alcorn told me about three upcoming albums she had in the can, including November's Canto, and Filament, which just came out a couple weeks ago as I was finishing up my article. Catherine Sikora plays saxophone, and she and Alcorn had just met before the live performance recorded for Filament, so it's got that interesting charge of two improvisors feeling each other out for the first time, I particularly like the second track where it feels like they start to loosen up and get louder. And in the last half hour, Sikora does some really cool rapid runs. 

6. Laura Jane Grace - Hole In My Head
This is a nice potent little 25-minute record, some rockers and some wordy coffeehouse folk punk. I particularly like the title track and "Mercenary," might be my favorite album Laura Jane Grace has made since Against Me!'s classic Transgender Dysphoria Blues

7. The Paranoid Style - The Interrogator
Another very wordy rock record -- Elizabeth Nelson is an unapologetically verbose songwriter and music critic, who packs her songs with clever verbiage worthy of Elvis Costello. "The Return of the Molly Maguires" and "That Drop Is Steep" probably have the biggest hooks of the album, I also really dig the pounding piano and screaming lead guitar on "The Formal." 

8. Scott Siskind - Let It All Calm Me EP
I'm a huge fan of Scott Siskind as a vocalist and songwriter from his band Vinny Vegas as well as his two solo EPs, I felt very fortunate to work with him on a few Western Blot songs. He's so good communicating emotion and drama with his voice, in fact once or twice I had to ask him to lighten up his delivery, because I just don't write sad songs like he does. "Fresh Eyes" and "Tell Me Where I Am" on this EP are some of the best stuff he's ever done, I think

9. The Last Dinner Party - Prelude To Ecstasy
As I said a few weeks ago, I really like all the singles The Last Dinner Party has released over the last year, and they're all on Prelude To Ecstasy, but they're probably the best songs. And the way they reference the Red Scare podcast and have a song called "The Feminine Urge" makes me just feel like this band is too online in an obnoxious way, but I guess it all squares with the posh theatricality of their whole sound and image, which I mostly like. 

10. Ryan Leslie - You Know My Speed
Ryan Leslie had a nice little run there with his first two albums in 2009, and writing and producing the first Cassie album, where it seemed like he'd follow Ne-Yo and The-Dream in being R&B's next big songwriter-turned-star. But then Cassie left Ryan Leslie for Diddy, something we know now had a whole dark side to it, and Leslie lost his major label deal and released a series of independent albums where he was rapping more and more, and it just felt like he got too far out of his R&B lane and it didn't work. But You Know My Speed, his first project in nearly a decade, is pretty solid. It kind of sounds like he could've made it in 2009. but that's not necessarily a bad thing, he was on fire in 2009. 

The Worst Album of the Month: Mick Mars - The Other Side Of Mars
Mick Mars was always the odd man out in Motley Crue, the little weirdo who's about a decade older than the other members of the band, a relatively shadowy figure in a group full of glammy natural born rock stars competing for the spotlight. When the only guitarist in a hard rock band is its least famous member, you know something unusual is going on. That dynamic was really entertaining in the book Motley Crue wrote together, The Dirt, and you always got the sense that Mars was on his own musical trip and probably would make very different music without them. But Mars retired in 2022, and was replaced with a new guitarist in Motley Crue, and they've been embroiled in a public feud and lawsuit for the past year. So Mars finally had the time to make a solo record, promising "something weird, special, great and loud," and I was rooting for him to actually deliver something at least moderately novel, like C.C. DeVille's Samantha 7 side project. Unfortunately, The Other Side Of Mars is just a bland hard rock record with a couple of anonymous singers delivering boilerplate lyrics over Mars's occasionally cool riffs and solos. It's that same kind of brooding mishmash of hair metal and grunge that Motley Crue was making in the John Corabi era, and it's disappointing that Mars waited decades to make something like this. 

Saturday, March 09, 2024

 






I interviewed Super City for the Baltimore Banner ahead of their show at Creative Alliance this weekend. 

TV Diary

Friday, March 08, 2024

 





a) "The Regime"
In "The Regime," Kate Winslet plays the autocratic chancellor of a fictional European country (they don't even give the country a name, which I kind of like, it fits the loopy unreality of it all). An HBO political satire about a woman unfit to lead invites comparisons to "Veep" or "Succession," but I think the more cinematic production values and a dramatic actress of Winslet's standing give the whole thing a regal Shakespearean tragedy vibe that's nicely undercut by the humor. It seems to be getting middling reviews but I wanna see how the whole season plays out, I'm intrigued. 

b) "Shogun"
This is a pretty cool lavish violent period piece, I think people have really been craving an epic series like this for a while because they're already talking about it being the new "Game of Thrones." I'm not quite as over the moon about it, but I like it so far, the big action setpieces are awesome. 

c) "The Completely Made-Up Adventures of Dick Turpin"
I remember years ago somebody was really eager to show me the British cult series "The Mighty Boosh" and I just did not take to it at all. I like Noel Fielding's new Apple TV+ series, though, it's just kind of an unapologetically silly historical comedy in the "Monty Python" tradition. 

d) "The New Look"
An appropriately stylish-looking Apple TV+ period piece about Christian Dior and Coco Chanel during and after World War II. I don't really know anything about the history of these people so it's interesting to me, to learn about the people behind these famous brands. But my favorite part is definitely John Malkovich, he's great in this, I wish he got more screentime but I guess the guy he's playing is inherently a supporting player in the story. 

e) "Constellation"
An Apple TV+ sci-fi series about an astronaut who comes home from a mission and is either losing her mind or stuck in some kind of rupture in reality or parallel universes. It's pretty good, but I feel like I've never seen a Noomi Rapace performance that made me feel anything, like she's just occupying space where another actress might have made me actually care about the character or be more curious about their inner thoughts. 

f) "Tracker"
There's a long tradition of the network airing the Super Bowl putting a scripted show on after the big game to take advantage of the big audience, sometimes an established hit, and sometimes the series premiere of a new show. "The Wonder Years" and, weirdly, "Homicide: Life On The Street" are some of the shows that aired their first episodes after the Super Bowl. This year it was "Tracker," a show about the himbo from "This Is Us" playing a survivalist who helps law enforcement find missing people in the wilderness. Pretty bland, garden variety CBS junk. 

g) "The Gentlemen"
I watched the Guy Ritchie movie The Gentlemen a couple years ago and it didn't leave a big impression but it was moderately fun. The new spinoff series is a completely different set of characters in a similar story about British nobility and cannabis selling and criminal schemes, and I like it so far, Theo James is really becoming an excellent leading man. 

h) "Avatar: The Last Airbender"
I've only ever seen the original animated "Avatar: The Last Airbender" in passing, and I never saw the M. Night Shyamalan live action movie. But people said that movie was bad, and they're also saying the new Netflix series is even worse, which I believe, this is pretty crappy-looking. 

Netflix has been churning out a ton of adaptations of books by the mystery writer Harlan Coben, I haven't finished this one yet but it seems like the promising one I've seen, in terms of the cast and production values. 

I really enjoyed "Suits" during its original run and thought it had a great cast, so when "Suits" became massively popular on Netflix last year, I hoped it would do good things for the actors' career. Sarah Rafferty in particular was great on "Suits" and hasn't been in a whole lot else of note, but the new Netflix show she's in, "My Life With The Walter Boys," is just a crappy teen soap opera where she plays one of the parents. 

I like the premise of this Hulu show, about a group of criminals 3 years after they pulled off a big heist and went their separate ways, been meaning to go back and finish it at some point, the first couple episodes were promising. 

l) "Extended Family"
I think Jon Cryer could've had a really excellent, interesting character actor career, but "Two And A Half Men" made him very rich and successful, so he's probably fine with that instead. Still, it's disappointing that his return to network TV is just a retread where he plays another pathetic divorced guy. In this show, his ex-wife is dating the owner of the Boston Celtics, played by Donald Faison, and apparently the show is based on the life of the real owner of the Boston Celtics, which is just weird, why did people think that needed to be a sitcom? Anyway, just a terrible laugh track sitcom, like devoid of even the virtues of "Two And A Half Men. 

m) "Saturday Night Live"
"SNL" has annoyed me a lot lately with things like Shane Gillis and Nikki Haley, but I think the show is in one of those cool phases where the younger cast members (Bowen Yang, James Austin Johnson, Sarah Sherman, etc.) are setting the tone more than the veterans. It even feels like they're finally letting Kenan Thompson carry the show less and giving Devon Walker a lot of the parts Kenan would usually play, like they're getting ready for him to finally leave in a year or two. Chloe Troast is my favorite new "SNL" player in a minute, she had a fantastic sketch in November that made me really take notice of her, but she hasn't gotten a lot more chances to really show off 

A new Fox animated series where Jon Hamm voices a main character who's a detective (but the character looks more like David Harbour, which always throws me off). Kind of feels like a satire of all those small town murder mystery shows, which is something that's ripe for parody, but I dunno, the humor is largely just generic Fox animated sitcom stuff. 

A sci-fi animated sitcom on Amazon Prime with lots of cool people who've never done animation before (Kieran Culkin, Natasha Lyonne, Stephanie Hsu), kind of a small chuckle type show but I enjoy the funhouse mirror space alien version of a hospital and the comedy that comes out of that. 

p) "Big Nate"
When I was a faithful newspaper comics section reader in the '90s, "Big Nate" was always one of those 3rd-tier strips I'd skip over or read with indifference. I didn't realize it even had the cachet to be adapted into an animated series, and it's kind of weird to see Nate's goofy chunky haircut in 3D animation, but my son and I watched a few episodes of teh show, it's not bad. 

My son has been through a big Sonic The Hedgehog phase. He's never played the games, but he keeps rewatching the movies and cartoon shows. This series that ran from 2014 to 2017 is one of those cartoons where the dialogue is surprisingly smarter than it needs to be, I keep catching all these references and big vocabulary words I don't expect. I actually explained the concert of feminism to my 8-year-old son after he saw the famous scene where Knuckles calls himself a feminist. 

r) "Pluto"
Apparently this new Netflix anime is a reboot of a series from the 2000s, kind of a cool murder mystery taking place in a world with robots (who are being murdered, along with humans). 

s) "Ready, Set, Love"
This Thai series on Netflix has a sort of "Squid Game"-like premise where it's a scripted show about a game show in a dystopian universe, a dating competition in a world where the population is only .01% male. Pretty interesting show, surprised this hasn't taken off in America like "Squid Game" to be honest. 

t) "Doctor Slump"
The creator of "Dragon Ball Z" made a manga in the '80s called Dr. Slump, but this is something completely different, a South Korean romcom about two people who hate each other but then end up living together after their respective careers in medicine go off the rails. 

u) "Criminal Code" 
A Brazilian series about federal investigators going after organized crime, feels very close to generic American shows about this kind of thing. 

v) "High Tides"
This Dutch show on Netflix about rich teenagers summering on the Belgian coast seems well suited for people who complain that there aren't enough gratuitous sex scenes anymore, there's just so much fucking on this show. 

w) "James Brown: Say It Loud"
This 4-part A&E docuseries is pretty excellent, covers James Brown's entire career in detail, looking at his work from a musical and cultural/political standpoint. And it doesn't try to sweep anything complicated under the rug, they've got two of his daughters talking about his history of abusing women, they get deep into how endorsing Nixon really broke a lot of his fans' hearts, but they still celebrate his huge contributions to music. 

"The Last Dance" has really opened the floodgates for docs about athletes and teams who won a lot, and I didn't think I'd find something about the Brady/Belichick-era Patriots interesting, because their dominance over the last 20 years became this boring thing that football fans seemed to hate. But they really tell the story well and make it compelling, especially the point where they'd built the franchise around Drew Bledsoe, and then Tom Brady stepped up as their backup QB and just thrived and it completely altered the trajectory of the team, I didn't really know about all that stuff. I wouldn't say I find Brady likeable, but he's an interesting figure, this young guy who was so obsessed with winning that he would cheat at Tecmo Bowl with his roommates when he was a rookie. 

Another Apple TV+ docuseries about one of the most successful athletes of our time. I love playing or watching soccer, but I don't follow the sport at all. When people say Lionel Messi is one of the most famous people on the planet and a superhuman talent, I just take their word for it. So it was cool to actually get to know the guy and his story, some of the highlights of him on the field are just nuts. 

z) "Superhot: The Spicy World of Pepper People"
I like spicy food, but I definitely have a limit where I don't want to eat something that's so spicy that I'm not enjoying it, and I find the world of insanely hot peppers and competitive eaters interesting. I didn't really think there'd be enough on the topic for an 10-episode docuseries, but there really is, that world is full of interesting personalities. 

Deep Album Cuts Vol. 350: Judas Priest

Thursday, March 07, 2024


























Judas Priest's 19th studio album Invincible Shield is out this week. So I wanted to do a playlist of the band's classic run, the first couple decades of Rob Halford's original run with Priest. 

Judas Priest deep album cuts (Spotify playlist):

1. Screaming For Vengeance
2. Beyond The Realms Of Death
3. The Sentinel
4. Hell Bent For Leather
5. Grinder
6. Victim Of Changes
7. Desert Plains
8. Ram It Down
9. Dissident Aggressor
10. Hot For Love
11. Riding On The Wind
12. Metal Gods
13. Genocide (live)
14. Run Of The Mill
15. Night Crawler
16. Rock Forever

Track 14 from Rocka Rolla (1974)
Track 6 from Sad Wings of Destiny (1976)
Track 9 from Sin After Sin (1977)
Track 2 from Stained Class (1978)
Tracks 4 and 16 from Killing Machine aka Hell Bent For Leather (1978)
Track 13 from Unleashed In The East (1979)
Tracks 5 and 12 from British Steel (1980)
Track 7 from Point Of Entry (1981)
Tracks 1 and 11 from Screaming For Vengeance (1982)
Track 3 from Defenders Of The Faith (1984)
Track 10 from Turbo (1986)
Track 8 from Ram It Down (1988)
Track 15 from Painkiller (1990)

In terms of putting together these playlists, Judas Priest is like an ideal artist to me, in the sense that they have big hits that have been on the radio a million times, but they also have a whole other set of songs that are canonical metal songs, live staples and fan favorites. So I mainly drew on the decades of conventional wisdom about Judas Priest's best songs for this, occasionally diverting or picking favorites or finding contrasts or thinks that fit together well in the sequence. The overwhelming majority of these playlists, especially these days, are in chronological order, but the early Priest stuff feels kind of low energy compared to how heavy they got by the end of the '70s, so it made more sense to mix things up and have some of those ass-kicking midperiod songs earlier on. 

I'm generally bigger on hard rock than metal, and my favorite hard rock frontmen are Freddie Mercury and Chris Cornell. So it makes sense that the metal singers I prefer are the dramatic wailers like Rob Halford, Bruce Dickinson, and Ronnie James Dio. Halford is a joy to listen to on all these songs, even the ones that would otherwise feel a little rote, his vibrato is insane. I remember watching the band's "Behind the Music" episode and hearing that little live clip of "Hell Bent For Leather" and being like, woah, these guys kick ass. Two years ago Judas Priest was nominated for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame -- they didn't get voted in with that year's main inductees, but a committee selected them for the Musical Excellence award and they got to be part of the ceremony and everything. I don't like that, because the Musical Excellence category used to be called 'Sidemen' and most of the people in it are musicians like Randy Rhoads or Scotty Moore who played alongside solo artists, not entire bands. Judas Priest should be in the Hall proper alongside Black Sabbath and Deep Purple, in my opinion. 

My Top 50 R&B Singles of the 1980s

Monday, March 04, 2024































Last year I wrote a list of the 50 best hip-hop singles of the 1980s for Spin, and now I'm gonna start making counterpart lists for other genres on here. Here's the Spotify playlist

1. Frankie Beverly & Maze - "Before I Let Go" (1981) 
Whether you know this song as being by Maze, Frankie Beverly, Frankie Beverly & Maze, or Maze featuring Frankie Beverly, it's the crowning achievement of the Bay Area band and their frontman. Maze capped their classic period with Live In New Orleans, and "Before I Let Go" was one of the new studio tracks tacked on after the live recording (Beyonce's hit 2019 cover was also a studio track at the end of a live album, I kinda wonder if that was a coincidence or an intentional callback). Beverly recently announced a farewell tour, bringing an end to a great 54-year run -- apparently the band will continue to tour with a difference vocalist as Maze Honoring Frankie Beverly, one more name. 

2. Prince - "Little Red Corvette" (1983) 
It's tempting to split hairs when doing genre lists -- "Little Red Corvette" was Prince's pop breakthrough and charted higher on the Mainstream Rock chart than on the R&B chart -- but I didn't want to do that too much here. Prince, Michael and Whitney redefined Black stardom in the '80s and are rightfully respected for that now, but at the time there was a lot more handwringing about authenticity and whether their music or image appealed more to White audiences. Now, I'm more interested in appreciating their work in the context of the R&B canon where it's always belonged.

3. Luther Vandross - "Never Too Much" (1981) 
Some of the greatest vocalists, especially in soul, are the backing vocalists on the side of the stage, keeping the big name solo star sounding better than they really are. Luther Vandross spent the '70s singing backup for a bunch of superstars, and released two unsuccessful albums with the group Luther -- one of Luther's songs, "Funky Music (Is A Part Of Me)," was adapted by David Bowie into "Fascination" on Young Americans. In the '80s, though, Vandross finally got his chance at solo stardom, after singing lead on the Italo disco group Change's "The Glow of Love" became a mainstream hit. And "Never Too Much" is just a tour de force, a perfect encapsulation of what would make Vandross perhaps the most revered male vocalist of his generation.  

4. The Isley Brothers - "Between The Sheets" (1983)    
The Isley Brothers' longevity is astonishing and unrivaled in popular music. They broke through with 1959's "Shout" and are still making hits today with founding frontman Ronald Isley, meaning they've been on the charts to some degree in 8 different decades. So "Between The Sheets" is both from the first half of the Isleys' run and one of the more cutting edge songs ever released by a group more than 20 years into its career, something that still sounds perfectly of-the-moment whenever it gets sampled every few years. 

5. New Edition - "If It Isn't Love" (1988)  
When Bobby Brown left New Edition, both parties initially floundered -- the group's Under the Blue Moon and Brown's solo debut King of the Stage each flopped in 1986. Two years later, though, they both rebounded big. In fact, Brown's Don't Be Cruel and New Edition's Heart Break were released the very same day in June 1988, each a multi-platinum blockbuster that helped define the New Jack Swing era thanks to new sets of producers and songwriters (Teddy Riley and Babyface with Bobby, Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis for New Edition). "If It Isn't Love" rides an almost industrial-sounding clanking loop that lends a nice weird edge to a classic earnest boy band song of yearning. 

6. Michael Jackson - "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" (1983)   
You can't really say that the opening track on the biggest album of all time is slept on, especially since it was a top 5 hit. But "Wanna Be Startin' Somethin'" is I think sort of the connoisseur's choice, currently the 6th most streamed song on Thriller (only ahead of the two non-singles and the cursed "The Girl Is Mine"), and it's the longest, funkiest track on the album, the one where MJ uses probably his largest assortment of voices and tones, just an incredible feat of vocal layering. 

7. Whitney Houston - "I Wanna Dance With Somebody (Who Loves Me)" (1987) 
Another song that feels a bit more like a genre-transcending pop megahit than straight up R&B. But Whitney Houston getting booed at the Soul Train Music Awards less than 2 years after "I Wanna Dance" is, I think, a sad chapter in the story of '80s R&B, a moment when a legend was treated with suspicion resentment for making great, successful music that didn't quite fit in the tidy genre boxes. I understand it to some extent, but Whitney didn't deserve it. 

8. Marvin Gaye - "Sexual Healing" (1982)
The music industry was flush with cash in the early '80s, and in 1982 alone veteran artists like The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, and Marvin Gaye signed huge, unprecedented new contracts -- CBS gave Gaye the biggest deal for any Black artist to date as he finally left his label of two decades, Motown. In a more ideal world, Midnight Love would've been the beginning of a whole new chapter for Gaye like Let's Dance was for Bowie, not his last big gift to the world before a sudden, shocking end. 

9. Tom Browne - "Funkin' For Jamaica (N.Y.)" (1980)     
The first sound you hear on "Funkin' For Jamaica" is Jamaica, Queens jazz musician Tom Browne's trumpet, but you wouldn't necessarily guess that it's his song -- vocalist Toni Smith sounds like an absolute star on it, even if none of her other many session gigs hit like her work with Browne. I love the quasi-rapped musician chatter in between the verses, especially the guy who fakes that he's going to quote "Theme from Shaft" but stops short of an f-bomb: "That Tom Browne, hey man, he is an...ordinary guy." 

10. Sade - "The Sweetest Taboo" (1985)   
Sade (the band) and Sade Adu (the singer) were one of the first British acts to get time on American R&B radio, and it feels like every year their enduring influence is felt a little more deeply. They were a precursor to neosoul (Sade guitarist/saxophonist Stewart Matthewman is all over most of Maxwell's albums) and the Nigerian-born and London-based Adu is a godmother to the last couple generations of more international R&B scenes that have cross-pollinated talent and influences between North America, the UK and Africa. 






























11. Soul II Soul - "Back To Life (However Do You Want Me)" (1989)
The London collective Soul II Soul were an example of how the UK was beginning to influence R&B more via dance music by the end of the '80s. They never quite sustained the success of their 1989 debut Club Classics Vol. One, but Soul II Soul's Nellee Hooper helped shape the sound of the '90s producing hits by Sinead O'Connor, Bjork, U2, Madonna, and Sneaker Pimps. 

12. The Gap Band – “Outstanding” (1982) 
Tulsa brothers Charlie, Robbie and Robert Wilson started the Greenwood, Archer and Pine Band in 1967, in reference to the Greennwood neighborhood's 'Black Wall Street' community that was destroyed in the Tulsa race massacre in 1921. But The Gap Band didn't release an album until 1974, and didn't really start making hits until the '80s, peaking with 1982's Gap Band IV (actually their 6th album). I got to interview Charlie Wilson once, I love that he's still out here sounding great and making everyone he works with sound better, as a go-to backing vocalist for multiple generations of hip-hop stars from Snoop Dogg to Pharrell Williams to Kanye West to Tyler, The Creator. 

13. Prince - "When Doves Cry" (1984)    
Often, the last song written for an album is a hit because the pressure is ramping up to make sure the album has a hit. Prince probably knew he already had a gang of hits on Purple Rain, though. He whipped up "When Doves Cry" overnight after director Albert Magnoli told him he needed a song to fit a montage scene, and he just happened to make an utterly unique chart-topping smash to launch the entire phenomenon. Part of the legend of "When Doves Cry" is that doesn't have a bassline -- and that Prince recorded one, but decided to mute it to make the song more strikingly unconventional. I don't think modern listeners would necessarily pick up on that without hearing the story, though -- "When Doves Cry" still has a massive low end just from the kick drum, much like a lot of popular music from the last few decades. 

14. Lipps Inc. - "Funkytown" (1980)  
Prince topped the R&B charts for the first time in late 1979 with "I Wanna Be Your Lover" just a few months before another surprising song out of Minneapolis called "Funkytown" scaled the Hot 100 (apparently Minneapolis isn't really Funkytown -- the lyrics are more of a fantasy of moving to a bigger, funkier town like New York City). Longtime Prince associate David Z played guitar in Lipps Inc., and "Funkytown" vocalist Cynthia Johnson was in an early lineup of The Time called Flyte Tyme, so they were all conected within the scene. But "Funkytown" still feels like something alien and singular, a synthy studio creation from the tail end of disco's commercial dominance that pointed the way towards the synth pop that disco would morph into. 

15. Janet Jackson - "When I Think Of You" (1986)   
For a few years, the hype around "the Minneapolis sound" was a little misleading because it was all, "Funkytown" aside, just Prince and acts he was producing and writing for. But Prince accidentally gave rise to another prolific Minneapolis hit factory when he fired Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis from The Time for moonlighting as producers. Soon, they hooked up with the little sister of Prince's biggest rival, and set off on a legendary run of their own. "When I Think Of You" was the first of 16 Jam & Lewis productions to top the Hot 100, dwarfing even Prince's number of chart-toppers (five as an artist plus "Nothing Compares 2 U." 

16. Stevie Wonder - "Do I Do" (1982)    
Stevie Wonder's music embodies joy better and more often than almost anyone else's, so it's hard to say if "Do I Do" is the most infectiously elated song in his catalog, but it's up there. And one of the things that puts it over the top is the genuine dorky enthusiasm in Wonder's voice when he announces, "Ladies and gentlemen! I have the pleasure to present, on my album, Mr. Dizzy Gillespie! Blow! Blow, blow, blow, blow!" Five years after topping the charts with a posthumous tribute to one jazz age giant, Duke Ellington, Wonder got to give another one last moment in the sun, and you can tell he was totally geeked about it. 
 
17. Teena Marie - "Square Biz" (1982)
Plenty of White artists like Daryl Hall & John Oates would occasionally top the R&B charts in the '80s, but pop radio was really their home. And even now when White singers like Robin Thicke become a regular presence on Black radio, Teena Marie remains sort of the gold standard that everyone else invariably gets compared to, usually unfavorably. All that aside, though, "Square Biz" just kicks ass, I get so excited when it comes on the radio. 

18. Chaka Khan – “What 'Cha Gonna Do For Me” (1981)
I saw Chaka Khan at Artscape when I was a kid, but I didn't really come to appreciate what a monster run she had, especially from '78 to '81 when she had hits both with Rufus and as a solo artist. It was hard to pick my favorite, but I eventually settled on this one, which I just learned was first written and recorded by Average White Band

19. Michael Jackson - "Rock With You" (1980) 
When I'm making album lists, I strictly go by release dates, but with singles lists, I tend to categorize songs by their year of impact, whenever they peaked on the charts. So while Off The Wall came out in 1979, "Rock With You" hit #1 in January 1980, setting the tone for the decade he'd become the king. Also, I like how "What 'Cha Gonna Do For Me" and "Rock With You" start with similar snare fills, so I wanted to put them together. 

20. Anita Baker - "Same Ole Love (365 Days A Year)" (1987)  
Anita Baker has much more obvious signature songs, but here and there I try to just embrace my personal favorites. And I just became infatuated with "Same Ole Love" maybe 20 years ago when I'd occasionally see the video on BET's "Midnight Love," when I was up late channel surfing in college. Legendary session bassist Freddie Washington sounds amazing on this song. 


































21. Cameo - "Word Up!" (1986)   
The oldest memories I have of any song on this list are of "Word Up!" which was a hit when I was 4-5 years old. So I really loved when the great animated series "Infinity Train" actually had "Word Up!" in an episode as part of someone's happy childhood memory. 

22. E.U. - "Da Butt" (1988)  
Chuck Brown, the Godfather of Go-Go, helped mint the genre with "Bustin' Loose," which peaked at #34 in 1979. Throughout the '80s, Go-Go became the pride of Washington, D.C., a fiercely loud and loose strain of live band funk, but Go-Go only troubled the charts in the same way one more time, peaking right in the same region of the Hot 100 when Spike Lee's School Daze helped boost "Da Butt" to #35. 

23. DeBarge - "I Like It" (1982)    
The DeBarge family and their groups Switch and DeBarge never quite became a royal pop family like their Motown precursors the Jacksons, but they had a pretty good run for a few years. The only sister in the group, Bunny DeBarge, wrote the often quoted "I Like It" bridge, delivered by El DeBarge, 

24. Prince and the Revolution - "I Would Die 4 U" (1985)  
The fourth single from Purple Rain doesn't have the same kind of pop immortality as the first three singles, but it's an important one to me. The 10-minute extended tour rehearsal version of "I Would Die 4 U" from the 12" single is amazing, one of my favorite memories with any pieces of music is listening to it while standing on the beach in Australia during my honeymoon. 

25. Bob Marley and the Wailers – “Could You Be Loved” (1980) 
The final album Bob Marley made in his lifetime, Uprising, might be his most religious record, but its most enduring song is the sweet little secular love song that fuses reggae and disco into an irresistible groove. These days, dancehall gets a lot more play than any Jamaican music from Marley's era on American R&B radio, but "Could You Be Loved" is that easy groove that just fits right in any time it gets played. 

26. Cheryl Lynn - "Encore" (1984)
"Encore" was Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis's first #1 on the R&B charts as producers, before they hooked up with Janet and started dominating the pop charts. For years, Cheryl Lynn was known on Twitter as one of those older artists who was active on social media and really understood how to use it, like Dionne Warwick, until everybody found out a few weeks ago that Lynn doesn't have any official account and the one posing as her has always been a fake. Weird! 

27. Janet Jackson - "The Pleasure Principle" (1987)  
My favorite piece of Janet Jackson trivia is that 5 members of The Time (everyone except Morris Day) produced Janet songs, not just Jimmy and Terry. Monte Moir went crazy with the drum programming and synth lines on "The Pleasure Principle." 

28. Teddy Pendergrass - "Love T.K.O." (1980) 
Teddy Pendergrass was probably R&B's #1 sex symbol at the dawn of the '80s. Sadly, a 1982 car crash left him paralyzed from the waist down. And while he released several more albums, he never got back to that level of "Turn Off The Lights" and "Love T.K.O." 

29. Tom Tom Club - "Genius Of Love" (1982)     
Talking Heads represented something of a new paradigm for rock bands: they loved R&B and Black music as much as '60s rockers, but they never really tried to mimic those influences and sound bluesy and soulful. By covering Al Green or taking inspiration from Fela Kuti and P-Funk while still being unapologetically bugged-out White art school weirdos, they sidestepped the authenticity question and came up with a unique fusion that still saluted the originals. And when the band's rhythm section went off and made a side project album, they ended up with a fluke hit that actually took off on R&B radio more than anything Talking Heads ever did and has been sampled by countless hip-hop and R&B acts. 

30. Nu Shooz - "I Can't Wait" (1986)
One of the weirdest triumphs of a White group on R&B radio in the '80s was the Portland, Oregon group Nu Shooz. Even the original version of "I Can't Wait" is pretty funky, but the remix by Dutch producer Peter Slagjuis, with all the vocal "ah" samples played on a synth, is really what made the song stand out and conquer multiple radio formats. Art of Noise's "Moments Of Love" had a similar vocal synth patch on a song that also crossed a White group over to Black radio in the mid-'80s.  

































31. Michael Jackson - "Beat It" (1983)   
Quincy Jones asked Michael Jackson to write a song like "My Sharona" in his (successful) quest to make Thriller the most widely appealing album ever, and thank god Michael didn't understand the assignment and wrote something much better than "My Sharona." 

32. The Dazz Band - "Let It Whip" (1982) 
I'm a little obsessed with how the biggest hit by this Cleveland group topped the R&B chart while Michael Jackson was making Thriller, and it has the same distinctive drum pattern as "Beat It." Can't be a coincidence, right? 

33. George Clinton - "Atomic Dog" (1983)   
George Clinton had an absolutely incredible run of leading both Parliament and Funkadelic in the '70s, it's just jaw-dropping how much great music they made in the space of a decade. Unfortunately, that run started to dry up right around the time Clinton released his first solo album, but we got one classic single out of that one. 

34. Patrice Rushen - "Forget Me Nots" (1982)    
"Forget Me Nots" features another unforgettable bass performance by Freddie Washington. It's interesting how the '80s was the last time musicians really moved freely between jazz and R&B, from Patrice Rushen and Quincy Jones to James Mtume and Thom Browne and countless session players. We definitely lost something when that crossover faded away. 

35. Rick James - "Super Freak" (1981) 
A huge number of the songs on this list were famously sampled in post-'80s rap and R&B hits, and I'm trying not to rattle them off too much here, because it almost goes without saying, but that was how I first experienced a lot of this music. And it took me a long time to hear "Super Freak" as anything but the MC Hammer sample, but I'm glad I eventually did, because it's so much better in its original form. 

36. Prince - "Controversy" (1981)  
Prince supported Controversy on the road as an opening act for Rick James, and it created a legendary rivalry as the young upstart got ready to surpass his elder. Controversy gets a little slept on sometimes as a transitional Prince album, but I love it, and the title track really feels like a preview of where he was headed on 1999

37. Starpoint - "Object Of My Desire" (1985)
Before Toni Braxton and Dru Hill, Starpoint were probably the biggest R&B act to come out of Maryland. And I got to interview a couple of the surviving members of Starpoint last year after their biggest hit was featured in "Stranger Things," but really their whole catalog is full of gems, I recommend checking out Starpoint beyond "Object Of My Desire." 

38. Janet Jackson - "Rhythm Nation" (1989)
Rhythm Nation 1814 had one of the most successful singles campaigns of all time, with seven top 5 hits and four #1s. The title track peaked at #2 behind a Phil Collins ballad, but it's impressive that it got that far, it's the closest any pop superstar got to making basically a Public Enemy song. 

39. Lionel Richie - "All Night Long (All Night)" (1983)  
Lionel Richie was the most unapologetically mild crossover star '80s R&B had, in a decade full of crossover success stories, and I kind of respect how well he understood his lane and never tried to overcompensate for it. Even his only song that could remotely be described as a 'banger' topped the Adult Contemporary chart with yacht rock smoothness. 

40. Zapp – “Computer Love” (1985)  
Lots of people manipulated the human voice with vocoders and talkboxes in R&B and dance music over the years. But before T-Pain became synonymous with AutoTune, Roger Troutman and his band Zapp were synonymous with talkbox vocals. In fact, the first time I saw a video credited to 'Zapp & Roger,' I was under the impression that Zapp was a robot and Roger was his human sidekick or something like that. "Computer Love" was the perfect song to sum up Troutman's whole aesthetic, although it got a little extra bit of human soul from Charlie Wilson's backing vocals. 
































41. Aretha Franklin f/ George Michael - "I Knew You Were Waiting (For Me)" (1987) 
If there were still doubts about the guy from Wham! and the level of his talent and how influenced he was by R&B, George Michael cleared things up by winning an R&B Grammy for a duet with the Queen of Soul, Aretha's overdue return to #1 for the first time since "Respect." 

42. Surface - "Happy" (1987)  
I used to love the R. Kelly song "Only The Loot Can Make Me Happy," so I was relieved to learn that everything I like about it was from a sample. I was also very surprised to realize that the New Jersey trio Surface had four R&B #1's, none of which is "Happy," which peaked at #2. Unfortunately, those other hits are all gooey ballads, and only "Closer Than Friends" sounds even a little like "Happy." 

43. The Jacksons - "This Place Hotel" (1981) 
"This Place Hotel" was after Off The Wall, so I can't really say it's the arrival of adult Michael Jackson, but it definitely feels like an early indication of what a zone he was in before Thriller, I love this song. "This Place" got its awkward title out of an attempt to avoid confusion with Elvis Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel." 

44. Bobby Brown - "Don't Be Cruel" (1988) 
Bobby Brown may have been amping like Michael, but he didn't share MJ's compunction about releasing a song with the same title as an Elvis hit. Radio stations probably played the single edit of "Don't Be Cruel" at the time, but these days when I hear the song, it's the whole 6:48 album version, which I love. It doesn't really need to be that long but I enjoy it. Babyface had just written his first R&B #1, "Girlfriend" by Pebbles, a year earlier, and Don't Be Cruel really marked his arrival as one of R&B's most successful songwriters ever. 

45. Jennifer Holliday - "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going" (1982)   
It's rare that songs from Broadway musicals cross over to the pop charts before being made into a movie. But Jennifer Holliday's legendary Dreamgirls showcase went to #1 on R&B radio and even #22 on the Hot 100, even better than Jennifer Hudson's impressive cover from the 2006 movie. 

46. Diana Ross - "Upside Down" (1980)    
I interviewed Nile Rodgers a few years ago, and he said, "In a weird way, even when I'm working with a superstar, I always think in terms of 'This is their first album.' So it's a strange thing -- even though they're stars and they have their footprint and their big, let's not go backwards, let's go forward." You can hear that philosophy at work on Diana Ross's 11th album Diana, which rebooted her career, and gave Rodgers and Bernard Edwards a second wind as producers and writers after the disco backlash cut Chic's hitmaking run short. I love how wordy this song is, "Respectfully I say to thee, I'm aware that you're cheating" probably shouldn't work in a dance track but Ross makes it work. 

47. Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam with Full Force - "I Wonder If I Take You Home" (1985)    
Freestyle, or Latin Freestyle, was briefly a huge commercial phenomenon in the second half of the '80s, an explosion of Hispanic artists out of New York and Miami making uptempo bangers that appealed to R&B radio, and gloopy ballads that crossed over to Adult Contemporary. I didn't really know anything about Freestyle until decades later, I just accepted it as part of the sound of the time. 

48. Milli Vanilli - "Girl You Know It's True" (1989)
The whole Milli Vanilli phenomenon was kind of an absurd music industry farce. But the first and best Milli Vanilli hit holds up pretty well as a song, and it was written here in Maryland, by a Baltimore group called Numarx (including future label executive Kevin Liles) with Starpoint's Ky Adeyemo and an Annapolis guy named Bill Pettaway, who continued working as a gas station attendant after the song became a huge hit. 

49. The Time – “777-9311” (1982)
The drum machine pattern that Prince programmed for "777-9311" is so legendarily weird and intricate that there was a fascinating Reverb piece about its origins last year. For a minute before 1999 really made Prince into a major star, the songs he was writing for The Time were doing about as well on R&B radio as his own songs, he was his own competition. 

50. Keni Burke - "Risin' To The Top" (1982)   
Keni Burke was a member of Chicago's The Five Stairsteps and one of the lead vocalists on their 1970 hit "Ooh Child," and over a decade later he was still making hits as a solo artist. "Risin' To The Top" is another one of those records that's at this point probably more famous for all the times it's been sampled than the song itself, but the original track is just perfection.