The Classic Album Thread

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The Classic Album Thread

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Weezer has been bad for a long time (Maladroit was their last good one) but Pinkerton is an undisputed classic.

And In Utero turned 25 (it was better than Nevermind)



Also The Beatles are going to release an expanded White Album edition for its 50th anniversary


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The Beatles set sounds good as long as its actual songs/demos/song fragments. If it's just "studio chatter" and such it'll be a waste of time. Some of the tracks on I think "Smile" are just talking, one where Brian is arguing with his pop who's telling him how to produce is intriguing.

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A great album to go out on. I don't think anyone expected George to have the first best post Beatles album. Had John come out with Imagine first then I think that might have changed the discussion. There's a doc about making the next Beatles album if they had stayed together.


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It makes sense he did when you think about it. He'd been writing for 5 years and most of his stuff was getting turned down. Like he came in with a ton of stuff for the White Album they mostly didn't use. So he had quite a stockpile of songs, whereas John and Paul were using theirs every year.

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True but you'd have thought John and/or Paul would have been leading the way with the first post Beatles album. Since they were so prolific as songwriters plus there's speculation that some songs were more Paul or John and the Lennon/McCartney credit on the publishing was to equal things out. I believe at one point Paul wanted to amend it as McCartney/Lennon. So in theory McCartney or Plastic Ono Band should have been more successful than George's album.

As you most likely know "Wah Wah" is about John and specifically Paul not letting George put his songs on the Beatles records. He quickly made it up with John though (I doubt they really fell out since they had a brotherly type relationship) and George plays on Imagine and even sings "Its Johnnys Birthday" to John on "All things must pass". Speaking of which you could condense it down to a singular record as in one sitting 3 LPs is a bit too much and he could have saved a lot of the other good songs for his next LP and reworked some of the Apple Jam record into proper songs instead of instrumentals.

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Interview with Sananda/TTD about the 25th anniversary of Symphony or Damn, his third LP. Link opens up into a PDF from his website but is an interesting read

https://www.sanandamaitreya.com/images_ ... vapors.pdf

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Also today is the anniversary of Stevie Wonder's Talking Book.


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Source writer Reginald C. Dennis on The Chronic
In 1992 we gave Dr. Dre’s The Chronic 4.5 mics. Had I the opportunity to press reset, I would have given it a 5. Here’s the story:

We got the advance of the album in October of 1992 and it immediately became an office favorite. And our version was a little better than the one everyone else got to hear because we had the joint that was sequenced differently, had different song arrangements and in some instances, different lyrics. It was all good. In fact it was too good — and I didn’t want to let the album out of my sight, so I decided that it would be reviewed totally in house, meaning that a fellow Source editor would handle the task (I didn’t want to risk the tape coming up missing, which was always a concern if you were mailing things out of state for review or dealing with Hip Hop writers who, due to their weed habits, tended to misplace things or drop the critical ball from time to time).

So my man Matty C, fellow editor and the king of Unsigned Hype, did the do, and he gave it 4.5 — he thought "Lil' Ghetto Boy" was the weak link in the chain — and that was that. I was firm on my “no 5’s” rule and that was also that. If you check the actual review, you’ll see that the byline is attributed to “TMS” (The Mind Squad) — which, for those that don’t know, was how we handled things that were done by group effort or committee. I can’t remember why we didn’t use Matt’s name, but it couldn’t have been because of anything too serious.

Anyway, no one could have predicted the seismic shift that this album would produce. And it wasn’t like there was anyone on staff jumping up and demanding that this record be a 5. We sent the review off to the printer around the time "Nuthin But A G Thang" started to catch fire and we could all tell that the landscape was about to change. By the time the magazine went on sale the streets had declared that this album – an album that many folks had still yet to hear – (remember: one of the reasons why folks read The Source was because were getting the music first and regularly reviewing important albums two months before they hit the racks) – was going to be a classic. And to tell you the truth, we all knew it as well.

I remember going to the video shoot for Naughty By Nature’s "Hip Hop Hooray." It was being filmed in a studio just off Astor Place in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village. I had the advance of The Chronic in my pocket the whole day. (I didn’t let that tape out of my sight for a second.) I watched Treach and Spike Lee do their thing for most of the afternoon, and if you’ll remember the video, much of it included footage of huge crowd scenes, which were being filmed that afternoon. So there were a lot of people around, maybe a couple of thousand all total; both inside the venue where the video was being shot and outside milling in the street and blocking traffic. You’ll also recall that that the video featured many Hip Hop guest stars, like Eazy-E and Run-D.M.C, who were also hanging out for their cameos. And because Naughty was so popular and because Spike was a celebrity director the video set became a news event and word began to spread that this was the place to be. It wasn’t long before The Source van arrived on the scene. And when I spotted it I came down stairs kicked it with my peeps. Well, since I had the Dre tape on me, and since the van had a ridiculous sound system, and since we had a huge crowd to play to… I put the tape in the deck and turned shit up full blast to get everyone’s attention and drown out the endless loop of Naughty’s constant "heeeeey, hooooo" chant. Well, the whole block literally stopped whatever they were doing and converged on the van in order to get a better listen. People were astonished by what they were hearing and began to pepper us with endless questions about the album. It was quite a moment. And when Nate Dogg came in with the "You picked the wrong mutha-fuckin’ dayeeeee…" part, I thought I was going to see people’s heads explode. Fab 5 Freddy actually climbed in the van and damn near put his head on the speakers. It was unreal. So yeah we knew early on that this was going to be the shit. The streets had spoken.

But I was trying to close the barn door after the horse had already escaped, and didn’t allow any flexibility for the possibility that we would encounter something that could be considered an instant classic. I set the ceiling at 4.5; it happened on my watch and I take full responsibility for the error.

Not giving The Chronic 5 mics did two things. One, it increased the level of background talk that The Source was biased against the West Coast. And two, it made getting 5 mics in The Source all the more desirable. In 1992, The Source was still the law of the land and people tended to go along with it. So, if The Chronic wasn’t worthy of 5 mics, then what was? It also elevated the historic status and overall value of the half dozen or so records that had received 5s in the past. By not getting 5 mics, The Chronic did more to elevate the status of the 5 mic club than any record that had previously received the award. It was the event that cemented the mics as Hip Hop’s governing standard.

Now I can talk your ears off about how, in terms of musical innovation and sheer cultural audacity, I believe that NWA’s Niggaz4Life was Dr. Dre’s true quantum leap. The Chronic is dope and deserves every accolade it has ever received, but the sudden jump between Straight Outta Compton and Niggaz4Life is a heart stopper. Yeah, by that point we’d all been following the evolution of Dre’s sound with the likes of The DOC and Above The Law and the 100 Miles and Runnin’ EP, but those first three songs on Niggaz4Life were unlike anything we had ever heard before. Just startling. And as masterful as The Chronic was, nothing on it – with the possible exception of Bitches Ain’t Shit — ever hit me in quite the same way.

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