Of all the phrases to enter the common parlance in the past few decades, perhaps none has been so misused and misunderstood as “meme.” In the internet age, it has come to mean intertextual images or GIFs posted on social media mostly for the lulz.
The term and the concept originally sprang forth from the mind of Richard Dawkins—a hero of mine before he revealed himself to be a reactionary bigot, but whose contributions to science I still cherish. In his seminal 1976 book, The Selfish Gene, Dawkins described the meme as a unit of cultural inheritance: an idea or belief that spreads from brain to brain, largely as a result of imitation. But as with any form of replication that involves non-random selection of random raw material (thoughts and behavior instead of genes in this case), memes evolve.
Which is a roundabout way of explaining why this list of my favorite albums—inspired by Jason Thorpe’s “My Ten Best,” which was itself inspired by Joseph Taylor’s “Ten Records to Start Your LP Library”—really says more about the author than it does about the music. Although hopefully, you’ll learn a little about the music, too.
The first thing you’ll learn about me from my own contribution to this meme is that I think top-ten lists are stupid. What’s so special about that number, aside from the fact that evolutionary forces seem to favor pentadactyly in Tetrapoda? Maybe for those of you who live in the civilized world and grew up with the metric system, this obsession with tens of things is more intuitively obvious. But we measure things in freedom units here in the Land of the Fees and the Home of Bravado, and will do anything in our power to avoid even acknowledging the existence of the metric system.
I also think that comparison is the thief of joy, and given that I’m a social anarchist (or anarchist socialist, depending on your preference), I cannot abide hierarchies in any form. So don’t expect this list of mine to be building toward anything. Only the top slot is immutable, and that’s almost by chance. The other albums on my list could just as easily swap places on any given day. They are all, in a sense, tied for second place.
The third thing I think you’ll probably be able to figure out by plugging this list into an LLM and asking it to make some predictions about the person who wrote it is my age. It is what it is. As with pretty much everyone, my favorite records became my favorites because they entered my life at a Very Important Time. Such times are mostly behind me now, so I doubt I’ll ever have another LP crack my Top Whatever.
So, with all that said, let’s get down to brass tacks. You’ll also notice some significant omissions here. No The Dark Side of the Moon. No Abbey Road. No Rumours. I love those as much as anybody, but it also means that I love them as much as everybody, and anything I could say about them would reveal next to nothing about the music—or about me, for that matter.
Following Jason’s lead, I’ll also be breaking my top . . . let’s call it 14 albums into two lists of seven. I like that. It’s two lists made of the best of all prime numbers, and the combined total is one-third of the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. And as much as I’d love to tell you that was my intention from the get-go, it’s post-hoc rationalization at its best.
So with no further ado—and again, in no particular order:
Anaïs Mitchell: Hadestown
One of the first records I bought after acquiring a turntable was Anaïs Mitchell’s brilliant folk-opera retelling of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in the Great Depression. Trying to explain exactly which version of Hadestown I wanted confused the heck out of my local record shop owner, though. Not the live recording with the original cast. Not the recording with the Broadway cast, either. No, I wanted the album itself, the studio recording.
The 2010 studio album—which features Mitchell herself as Eurydice, Justin Vernon (aka Bon Iver) as Orpheus, Ani DiFranco as Persephone, and the inimitable Greg Brown as Hades—may be an incomplete statement to fans of the musical, given how much the latter has evolved over the years. But as a work of art, it’s unparalleled. It’s simultaneously rooted in the past and a warning for the future. It’s almost difficult to listen to “Why We Build the Wall” and remember that it was written before Trump’s rise to power.
But forget all of that. Forget the politics. Forget the mythology. Forget the star power. Hadestown is, at its heart, simply an amazing work of Americana and deserves to be put on a pedestal as one of the genre’s most important and (hopefully, time will tell) enduring works.
A Tribe Called Quest: The Low End Theory
One of the best sophomore efforts of all time (another of which also makes this list, by the way), The Low End Theory probably should’ve collapsed under the weight of its own expectations. Following on from People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm—an album I sometimes gravitate toward even more than this one because of its youthful energy and delightful silliness, as well as its willingness to experiment and occasionally fail—TLET not only trumps its predecessor in terms of groovability, chillness, and flow; it also propelled Busta Rhymes into the spotlight, which would have been enough to secure its place in music history.
Again, though, even without the historical significance, even without Ron Carter’s world-class bass line on “Verses from the Abstract,” TLET was the breakthrough album that proved to anyone who would listen that hip-hop could be—and indeed was—way more than merely the white-boy antics of Beastie Boys or the gangsta affectations of N.W.A and their like.
What makes it such an enduring work of art is that it is, in the parlance of a bygone era, “all killer, no filler.” There’s not a wasted note here, not a wasted beat, and not a single track that you would ever consider skipping. So props to People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm for swinging too hard and occasionally missing. But you have to respect how much Q-Tip et al grew and evolved in the short gap between albums, and you have to appreciate that The Low End Theory knocks it out of the park with every swing of the boom-bat.
Björk: Vespertine
As I’ve made clear in the past, the question of which of Björk’s albums is my favorite is nearly constantly in flux. But the work that rises to the top of that list more frequently than the rest is her 2001 exploration of microbeats, found sounds, music boxes, and insect wings: Vespertine. It’s such a weird album in Björk’s already-weird body of work. But perhaps more so than any other, it exemplifies the distinction between an album and a mere collection of songs.
This, in my opinion, was the record where Björk dialed her approach to album concepts to 11, but it’s not a slave to the concept, as later efforts such as Fossora would be.
What’s more, Vespertine is Björk’s least-skippable record by a long shot. You might find yourself wanting to fast-forward to bangers such as “Pagan Poetry,” but although that track may have been an A-side single, complete with its own CD and DVD releases, it works best as a continuation of “Undo,” which flows perfectly from “It’s Not Up to You,” and so on and so forth.
Every song on Vespertine is made better by the ones surrounding it. And although it’s not very useful as a reference recording for all the reasons listed in the article linked above, it’s nevertheless one of the most fascinating-sounding albums ever made. It’s a feast for the ears and the brain alike, despite the fact that it was mixed and mastered to sound good on the tiny, terrible laptop speakers of the era.
Guns N’ Roses: Appetite for Destruction
It was 1988. I’d just purchased my first car, a 1978 Camaro held together with gumption and Bondo, and I was looking forward to the day when I could drive it without supervision. I still didn’t have my driver’s license and felt chained down by my learner’s permit. And like the rebel I am, that tension reached a breaking point one day when I decided to ride dirty and go to the mall, as nothing more than a pure expression of freedom. It was a simpler time.
My wanderings eventually led me to Musicland, where a Celtic Cross dotted with a bunch of hairy skulls stood out from the rest of the new (or, in this case, newly promoted) music releases. It reminded me of the Grateful Dead, my favorite band then, as it is now. I flipped over the cassette case and perused the track listing. “Sweet Child o’ Mine” stood out. That was that song with the circus melody I’d seen the video for on MTV, played by the sculpted Muppet in the top hat.
Nothing about the album cover or the familiarity with the band’s first truly breakout single prepared me for what would happen when I popped that cassette into the aftermarket Alpine tape deck sloppily installed in the dashboard of my rusty Camaro and pressed play. But it changed me forever.
Years later, yes, I’m bothered by the album’s misogyny, and it’s difficult to listen to Axl Rose singing without being reminded of his petulant behavior that ruined many a concert, not to mention the band itself. But to this day, Appetite for Destruction is the first album I listen to when I get a new ride or install a new radio in said ride.
It’s also the album by which I make sense of the weird passage of time, especially as I age. When this one first came out, Sgt. Pepper’s was 20 years old and seemed like ancient history. Appetite for Destruction is now two years shy of 40 years old, and it feels as urgent as ever. Thankfully, in my old age I’ve also learned to give Sgt. Pepper’s the respect it deserves.
Beastie Boys: Paul’s Boutique
Fast-forward to the summer of 1989. Unlike with Appetite for Destruction but very much like with The Low End Theory, everybody knew Beastie Boys’ second album was on the way. The group’s previous effort, their debut LP Licensed to Ill, was the soundtrack of many a youth’s high-school years. It was the ultimate party album. It was—let’s be honest about this—the gateway drug for a lot of white folks who couldn’t get into hip-hop before. And everyone I knew at the time was ready for more of the same when the sequel was released three years later.
So much so that my entire friend group gathered for a listening party on the day it was released. There were, to the best of my memory, nine of us there, crammed into one of our bedrooms.
By the end of the fourth track, “Egg Man,” there were only two of us left. Everyone else had noped out in utter disappointment. Where was the juvenile celebration of party culture? Where was the in-your-face machismo?
What we got instead was an experimental, borderline psychedelic sample-fest produced by the Dust Brothers, papered over with a collage of pop-culture references old and new, mashed up with what David Handelman of Rolling Stone accurately described as a “poetic tornado of imagery.”
Most of our friend group eventually came around to the album’s unmitigated brilliance, and they never let me and Wade forget that we got it, when everyone else wrote the record off as weird and chaotic. “Y’all were right when you said Paul’s Boutique is the future!” they offered, all too kindly.
They were wrong, of course. It wasn’t the future. The album’s heavy reliance on sampling contributed to a seismic shift in the recording industry, as well as a lawsuit—Grand Upright Music, Ltd. v. Warner Bros. Records Inc.—which unsurprisingly targeted Biz Markie, a black man, instead of three Jewish boys from Brooklyn.
Whatever the reason and/or particulars, Paul’s Boutique was more of a signpost near the end of the road of a particular era in hip-hop history, and its legacy is more rooted in mash-up masterpieces such as Girl Talk’s All Day than it is anything in the domain of rap. Hell, it barely sounds like any of the Beastie Boys albums that followed, never mind the whole genre.
But it still stands as one of the greatest albums ever made.
Cake: Comfort Eagle
In May of this year, I lost my dear friend Michael Gaughn, former editor of The Absolute Sound and Sound & Vision. Mike and I talked on the phone nearly every day during the seven years we worked together, and many of those conversations devolved into heated arguments, or at least disagreements. But the two things we agreed on without fail were the brilliance of Randy Newman and the unappreciated genius of Cake, the latter of which we both viewed as the best band of the 1990s, with all apologies to Nirvana.
The one thing we couldn’t agree on was which Cake album was the best. Mike lobbied hard for Fashion Nugget, and I could see his case. But for me, Comfort Eagle is where it’s at.
I almost resent the fact that the album contains so many bangers the likes of “Short Skirt/Long Jacket,” “Meanwhile, Rick James . . .,” “Love You Madly,” “Opera Singer,” and “Shadow Stabbing,” one of only three songs in the history of recorded music—alongside Average White Band’s “Pick Up the Pieces” and Vince Guaraldi’s “Linus and Lucy”—with the ineffable power to force my body to feel joy no matter how much my brain wants to wallow in a dark cloud.
That may seem an odd thing to resent, but I worry at times that it makes Comfort Eagle seem like merely a collection of catchy songs. I think that’s why Mike couldn’t bring himself to fully embrace this album by his favorite band, tainted as it was by its track-by-track popularity.
But Comfort Eagle is so much more than the sum of its proverbial parts. It’s a perfectly sequenced collection from beginning to end, and some of the worst arguments my wife and I have ever gotten into involved her trying to skip ahead to track 4 right out of the gate.
No, ma’am. You press play on “Opera Singer” and you don’t stop listening until:
In your world of two
There’s only room
There’s only room
There’s only room
For you
Lyle Lovett: I Love Everybody
There’s only one musical act I’ve seen in concert more times than I’ve seen Cake, and for whatever reason, people are always shocked to discover it’s the king of Texas Swing, Lyle Lovett. Picking a favorite among his 12 studio albums is tough, since they’re all amazing from beginning to end (well, OK, except for Release Me, which was purely a contractual obligation).
But there’s just something quite special about his fifth: 1994’s I Love Everybody. It came out just over two years after the release of Joshua Judges Ruth, which I think everyone at the time assumed would be impossible to top. Instead of going forward, though, Lovett glanced backward, dipping into a collection of songs he wrote before the release of his eponymous 1986 debut. But in terms of musical styling, I Love Everybody represented a maturation and deviation from what came before.
The songs herein seem autobiographical, but Lovett employs a storytelling technique made famous by his future duet partner Randy Newman, in that the characters he plays here are horrible people. Or broken people. Or just plain strange people. And yet, there’s an undeniable joy that permeates the record, largely—I think—due to Lovett’s recent marriage to Julia Roberts, who provides backing vocals on a couple of the tracks. It’s simultaneously sardonic and silly, which adds some necessary levity to its exploration of humankind’s basest (as well as its purest) instincts.
Like all the best albums, there’s simply not a dud in the bunch here, and although this is anecdotal at best, I can tell you that songs from I Love Everybody always get the biggest cheers when Lovett plays them live (at least they have in the—if I’m recalling correctly—26 concerts of his I’ve attended). Perhaps only “That’s Right (You’re Not from Texas),” from The Road to Ensenada, and “If I Had a Boat,” from Pontiac, come anywhere close to energizing the crowd nearly so much.
Again, though, it’s not about the quality or memorability of the songs in isolation that makes I Love Everybody such a standout; it’s the consistency, the sequencing, the journey. It belongs in every music fan’s collection, whether you like “country” music or not. (And I use mocking quotation marks there, because as my dad will tell you, “Lyle Lovett is a wild-haired freak who don’t make real country music.”)
And that’ll do it for now. If you haven’t given up on me by this point, stay tuned for the second half of my Top 14, which should drop on January 1.
. . . Dennis Burger
dennisb@soundstagenetwork.com
