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First posted 5/24/2015. |
DavesMusicDatabase.com is devoted to ranking, rating, and reviewing music of all genres and eras. The DMDB blog serves up album and song reviews, best-of lists, music history snapshots, and music-related essays.
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Showing posts with label Blonde on Blonde. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blonde on Blonde. Show all posts
Monday, February 13, 2023
Sunday, November 29, 2020
Acclaimed Music: Top 100 Albums
 | Acclaimed Music:The Top 100+ Albums |
According to Wikipedia, “Acclaimed Music is a website created by Henrik Franzon, a statistician from Stockholm, Sweden, in September 2001. Franz has statistically aggregated hundreds of published lists that rank songs and albums into aggregated rankings by year, decade, and all-time.” The lists include a ranking of the top 3000 albums, of which the top 100 are listed here. According to the website, this list was last updated 11/29/2020. Check out other publications and organizations’ best-of album lists here.
1. The Beach Boys Pet Sounds (1966)
11. Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited (1965)
21. Pink Floyd Dark Side of the Moon (1973)
31. The Jimi Hendrix Experience Electric Ladyland (1968)
41. Ramones Ramones (1976)
51. The Pixies Doolittle (1989)
61. Sly & the Family Stone There’s a Riot Goin’ On (1971)
71. Paul Simon Graceland (1986)
81. The White Stripes Elephant (2003)
91. Radiohead In Rainbows (2007) Resources and Related Links:
First posted 8/5/2020; last updated 11/29/2020. |
Wednesday, May 22, 2019
Dave's Music Hall of Fame: Album Inductees (May 2019)
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Originally posted 5/22/2019. January 22, 2019 marked the 10-year anniversary of the DMDB blog. To honor that, Dave’s Music Database announced its own Hall of Fame. Since then, 23 songs, 9 albums, and 10 acts have been inducted. This month marks the second batch of album inductees. These 10 works have been selected because they topped DMDB genre/specialty lists for classic rock, classical, country, folk, live albums, metal, opera, punk, rap, and R&B. It should be noted that blues, cast albums, and jazz were not included in this list because the top albums of each of those genres were already inducted – Robert Johnson’s The Complete Recordings (blues), Rodgers & Hammerstein’s South Pacific (cast album), and Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue (jazz). |
Johann Sebastian Bach Goldberg Variations (1741)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (classical).” |
| Scholars have debated the specifics about the origin of the work, but have generally accepted that they were commissioned by Johann Gottlieb Goldberg, JK who may have been the first to perform them. WK Many records suggest that Bach once taught Goldberg, a famed virtuoso, who would have easily been able to play the variations. They were originally written for harpsichord, but are sometimes performed on piano. WK In fact, pianist Glenn Gould gave the Goldberg Variations their greatest audience with several recordings, collectively exceeding two million in sales. His recording was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1983 and added to the National Recording Registry in 2003. Read more. |  |
James Brown Live at the Apollo, Vol. 1 (1962)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (live).” |
| “There is no more exciting document of live performance in the history of R&B.” AZ Brown asked his record label to record one of his shows. When they refused, he bankrolled the project himself, TL knowing “his live performances contained electricity unable to be reproduced in the studio.” RV “By the end of these thirty-two minutes, no one will doubt that James really was the hardest working man in show business (and this without even seeing him dance!).” AMG It ended up on the Billboard charts for more than a year, peaking at #2 and becoming “a watershed album, both for James Brown and for the burgeoning soul music movement.” AMG Read more. |  |
Johnny Cash Live at Folsom Prison (1968)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (country).” |
| In one of his two legendary live albums recorded for a prison audience, “Cash plays to the audience, selecting a set of songs that are all about prison, crime, murder, regret, loss, mother, God, and loneliness.” AMG “He never did any hard time, but Cash had a natural sympathy for men who gave in to their worst impulses.” TL “Cash stimulates the audience’s emotions, which in turn stimulates his performance, especially since he delivers the songs with the conviction of someone who has lived through it.” AMG “Few albums come as close to capturing the darkness and rage that lays deep in Cash’s music, as well as the depth of his talent.” AMG Read more. |  |
Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde (1966)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (folk).” |
| With Blonde on Blonde, Dylan was moving toward “leaving coffee bars behind forever…to bring country into rock & roll.” BL It “is an album of enormous depth” AMG that “reaches some of Dylan’s greatest heights – which is to say, the very pinnacle of rock.” TL It “is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay.” TL It blends “blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound.” TL It was “the culmination of Dylan’s electric rock & roll period – he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.” AMG Read more. |  |
Marvin Gaye What’s Going On (1971)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (R&B).” |
| Gaye’s album of social commentary on “urban decay, environmental woes, military turbulence, police brutality, unemployment, and poverty” AMG became “one of the defining albums of its time.” TL Initially Motown founder Berry Gordy balked at the idea, thinking it would be a commercial failure, but it became “the most important and passionate record to come out of soul music” AMG and “the most perfect expression of an artist’s hope, anger, and concern ever recorded.” AMG It “catapulted Marvin Gaye into superstardom.” BN and “kicked off an era of unprecedented social consciousness in R&B…[and] introduced a whole new style of making records.” TL Read more. |  |
Guns N’ Roses Appetite for Destruction (1987)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (metal).” |
| “Guns N’ Roses’ debut, Appetite for Destruction was a turning point for hard rock in the late ‘80s – it was a dirty, dangerous, and mean record in a time when heavy metal meant nothing but a good time.” AMG Guns N’ Roses embraced “the wasted rock star lifestyle with such earnest determination that you’d think they invented it.” GW Lead singer Axl “Rose’s misogyny, fear, and anger hard to dismiss as merely an artistic statement; this is music that sounds lived-in.” AMG As good as his “lyrics and screeching vocals are, they wouldn’t be nearly as effective without the twin-guitar interplay of Slash and Izzy Stradlin, who spit out riffs and solos better than any band since the Rolling Stones.” BL Read more. |  |
Led Zeppelin Led Zeppelin IV (1971)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (classic rock).” |
| While “the first four Led Zeppelin albums are all air-curdling classics, monolithic slabs of sleazy sweat-riffs and heavy gravity, [this] is their most staggeringly ambitious.” DK It “not only [defined] Led Zeppelin, but the sound and style of ‘70s hard rock.” AMG It “turned them from mere superstars into giant behemoths of the rock world,” AZ1 “an important stylistic template for everything from heavy metal to grunge.” BN Read more. |  |
Claudio Monteverdi L’Orfeo (Orpheus) (1607)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (opera).” |
| Monteverdi’s L’Orfeo is “based on the Greek legend of Orpheus, and tells the story of his descent to Hades and his fruitless attempt to bring his dead bride Eurydice back to the living world.” WK “It was written in 1607 for a court performance during the annual Carnival at Mantua.” WK ‘In his published score Monteverdi lists around 41 instruments to be deployed, with distinct groups of instruments used to depict particular scenes and characters.” WK “After the composer’s death in 1643 the opera went unperformed for many years, and was largely forgotten until a revival of interest in the late 19th century.” WK Since then, it has gained the reputation as “the earliest that is still regularly performed.” WK Read more. |  |
Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (rap).” |
| Nation “rewrote the rules of what hip-hop could do.” STE It is “one of the greatest and most influential albums of all-time” WK in any genre. The group “set out to make…the hip hop equivalent to Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, an album noted for its strong social commentary.” WK Los Angeles Times critic Robert Hilburn said, Chuck D “isn’t afraid of being labeled an extremist, and it’s that fearless bite…helps infuse his black-consciousness raps with the anger and assault of punk pioneers like the Sex Pistols and Clash.” WK Read more. |  |
Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (1977)Inducted May 2019 as a “Top Album of Its Genre (punk).” |
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This “has become punk’s ground zero.” TM “One album was all they made, and probably all anyone could stand.” TL The Sex Pistols “made old-fashioned rock bad boys such as The Rolling Stones and The Who look like wimps in comparison.” RV Their “loud, snotty and angry” |  |
Monday, June 20, 2016
Today in Music (2016): Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde
Blonde on Blonde |
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Released: June 20, 1966 Charted: July 23, 1966 Peak: 9 US, 3 UK, 4 AU Sales (in millions): 2.0 US, 0.3 UK, 10.0 world (includes US and UK) Genre: folk rock |
Tracks:Song Title [time] (date of single release, chart peaks) Click for codes to charts.
All songs written by Bob Dylan. Total Running Time: 72:57 |
Rating: 4.701 out of 5.00 (average of 28 ratings)
Awards:(Click on award to learn more).
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About the Album:“In 1965 and 1966, Bob Dylan went on a creative sprint that has never been matched. Over the course of fourteen months, Dylan recorded Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited – and then capped it off with Blonde on Blonde,” TL “arguably the finest record of the decade.” CQDouble AlbumThis has been called “rock’s first significant double album.” TL Paste magazine’s Matt Mitchell goes so far as to call it “the greatest double album ever made.” PM He says, “Dylan was at the height of his powers in every sense of the term” and that “Blonde on Blonde is massive in scale and execution.” PM He also says it “should be credited with re-inventing the language of rock ‘n’ roll, as it remains miraculously taut and marvelously triumphant.” PMStill, “like famous double albums to come, there is some debate this would have made a better single album set. Trouble is, too many good songs for two sides of vinyl, maybe not enough good songs for four sides.” AD Moving ForwardThe album captures a weary Dylan, “a pill-popping rock star who was sick of playing star, wary of hangers-on, and more than willing to spew bile at anyone in his way.” EW’93 This captures that, “complete with careening music that bites as hard as his words.” EW’93 Earlier that year, Dylan had been booed at the Newport Folk Festival when “he dared to brandish an electric guitar.” RV “Fans couldn’t take the idea of their idol..debasing himself before the false gods of money and fame.” CC His “hostile reaction created a rift between the artist and his audience. Instead of falling apart from the subsequent anxiety, Dylan’s recordings and performances became all the more galvanized, leading to the zenith of his career.” RV“Both the folk messiah and the prophet of folk rock are here, finding a middle ground that surpasses even Highway 61 Revisited’s accomplished symbiosis.” RV If that album “played as a garage rock record…Blonde on Blonde inverted that sound, blending blues, country, rock, and folk into a wild, careening, and dense sound.” TL “Blonde on Blonde took Dylan’s modernist poetics and merged them full-on with the electric blues and folk rock he’d so poignantly fleshed out in the year prior.” PM It “is an album of enormous depth,” AM with “a tense, shimmering tone” TL that “reaches some of Dylan’s greatest heights – which is to say, the very pinnacle of rock.” TL Blonde on Blonde was “the culmination of Dylan’s electric rock & roll period – he would never release a studio record that rocked this hard, or had such bizarre imagery, ever again.” AM The LyricsThis album is “the true mark of our greatest lyrical visionary.” PM “Its ever-shifting combinations of intense roots music and sweeping narrative represent storytelling on an extraordinarily high level; some consider it the closet thing in rock to classic literature.” TM It “is comprised entirely of songs driven by inventive, surreal, and witty wordplay, not only on the rockers but also on winding, moving ballads.” TL“Dylan is having fun…playing with words as much for the way they sound as for what they mean.” JD “Blonde on Blonde embodies the range of human emotions unlike any other album ever released, and it's a tribute to an artist who never stopped evolving.” RV The Music“The music matches the inventiveness of the songs, filled with cutting guitar riffs, liquid organ riffs, crisp pianos, and even woozy brass bands.” AM Dylan was moving toward “leaving coffee bars behind forever…to bring country into rock & roll.” BL It was “a brilliant tour through the music of America past, present and future, touching on everything from Chicago blues to country waltzes to New Orleans marches, all delivered with a voice that was full of rock ‘n’ roll passion, and the ferocity, scorn and lust of a man at the end of his rope.” JDIn Howard Sounes’ Down the Highway: The Life of Bob Dylan, organist Al Kooper said, “Nobody has ever captured the sound of 3 a.m. better than that album… even Sinatra, gets it as good.” JD Dylan said, “The closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my mind was on the Blonde on Blonde album. It’s that thin, that wild mercury sound. It’s metallic and bright gold.” CM The Recording of the AlbumBlonde was recorded over three months in 1966, first in New York and then in Nashville. The New York sessions included work with Dylan’s touring group, The Hawks, who later became The Band. When “he couldn’t seem to find his groove” JD producer Bob Johnston suggested moving the sessions to Nashville, where Dylan, Kooper, and the Hawks’ Robbie Robertson assembled alongside local session musicians. It “was one of the first instances of a rock musician recording in the home of country music with Nashville musicians.” TB They give the album “a more fluid, expansive quality than the harsh folk rock of…Highway 61.” TB“The bulk of the songs were busked in the studio; Dylan only had shadows of what he wanted.” CC He recorded live in the studio, having musicians “record in a circle, playing off one another during a series of gloriously sloppy extended jams. Most of the 14 tracks were captured on the first or second take, shortly after Dylan finished writing them. ‘The musicians played cards, I wrote out a song, we’d do it, they’d go back to their game and I’d write out another song,’ the artist said in 1968.” JD The SongsThe album “veer[s] wildly between the silly, the serious and the surreal – sometimes all in the same song.” JD Some songs “borrow the surreal imagery and character types of the subdued ‘Desolation Row,’ and set them to up-tempo, glowing arrangements of harmonica, guitars, and swirling organs.” CQ “But if there is one recurring theme at its heart, it isn't politics or spirituality (the topics the folkie purists hoped the sage would tackle), but something much more familiar yet elusive.” JDHere’s thoughts on each of the songs individually. “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” “The song is at once a devilishly playful and unapologetic pro-drug anthem (one of rock’s first, and most daring for the time, with its recurring refrain of ‘Everybody must get stoned’); a sarcastic and cautionary tale of how society demonizes outsiders and rebels.” JDHowever, while “the often-misunderstood lyrics connote for many listeners the drug culture of the late ‘60s…[the] song actually has more to do with the way women drag men through the mud no matter what they do.” RV
“Pledging My Time” “Visions of Johanna” “The song encompasses the timeless dilemma of when it’s all right to finally move on – the narrator must choose between a woman who loves him and the images of the woman who conquers his mind. Dylan’s heartfelt poetry may be unmatched by any other song in his catalogue. The single line ‘Ain’t it just like the night to play tricks when you’re tryin’ to be so quiet?’ stands as one of the most beautiful images Dylan has ever written.” RV It also features “the finest set of vocals Bob ever laid down.” AD The song is “dreamy and strangely romantic” AD and features “Bob’s symbolism and imagery rich lyrics.” AD In the book 25 Albums That Rocked the World!, Patrick Humphries called this “the masterpiece of the set.” CC “One of Us Must Know” “I Want You”
“Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again” This is “another of those great Dylan songs about places. Few American songwriters have conveyed the space and variety of their nation as well as Dylan…He manages to convey the full awfulness of being marooned in Mobile, Alabama, buring with the blues from Memphis, Tennessee.” CC “Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat” “Just Like a Woman” Critic Adrian Denning, however, calls this “another display of a sweeter Bob Dylan. A Bob Dylan love song. It’s just as good as ‘I Want You’ if not slightly better.” AD “The lyrics describe Sedgwick as fully-embodied woman who feels and loves with strength, but somehow can’t keep it together.” RV
“Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine” “Temporary Like Achilles” “Absolutely Sweet Marie” “4th Time Around” “Obviously 5 Believers” “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” It is “impossibly beautiful” AD and “another great vocal performance on an album full of them.” AD The song “sweetly reveals pieces of Dylan’s relationship” CQ with his new bride, Sara, Lowndes, “who would later inspire the spiteful songs that inhabit Blood on the Tracks,” RV which as often been called his “divorce album.” Here, though, Dylan is “describing Sara as saint-like with silky skin, a mercurial mouth and soulful eyes, and he pledges his undying devotion to her.” RV The song’s epic 11-minute run time, “then the longest popular song on record,” TB was unheard of to the Nashville musicians who were “used to playing on tw-minute country tracks.” TB Drummer Kenny Buttrey said, “It went on and on…We’d never heard anything like this before.” TB |
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First posted 5/16/2013; last updated 8/9/2024. |
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