PJ Media

The 10 Essential Hip-Hop Albums

Hip-hop stands as one of the few uniquely American cultural developments of the last century, yet the genre remains misunderstood. The artistic subculture first combined spoken poetry with instrumental beats, original compositions and sampled elements from across the spectrum of blues, jazz and rock and roll, building on what came before to create a cultural juggernaut and global phenomenon.

Because the lines between pop and hip-hop have blurred over the last two decades, a majority of casual listeners continue to define the genre based on what they hear on the radio. Many music fans paint the entire hip-hop world with the stereotypical brush rather than take the time to understand it.

Whether you’re a hip-hop fan since birth or just looking for an intro to the genre, these ten classics deliver.

And Parental Advisory Warning: many videos feature lyrics NSFW.

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#10 – Dr. Dre – The Chronic

The Chronic marked the solo debut of Dr. Dre, formerly of N.W.A., who staked his claim as one of hip-hop’s most respected production innovators. Released in 1992 on his own Death Row Records label, the album features guest appearances by Snoop Dogg, who used the album as a launch-pad for his own career. The album peaked inside the top five on Billboard, going triple platinum and widely popularizing the G-Funk sub-genre within gangsta rap. This album remains among the most influential of the nineties, known for its top-notch production values. Dre waited a decade to release a sophomore effort, but as far as singular debuts go, this one’s a can’t miss.

Essential Tracks: “Let Me Ride,” “Nothing But A ‘G’ Thang,”

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Posted at 11:10 am on April 26th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Peter Gabriel + 46 Piece Orchestra = Surprisingly Dull Listening Experience

Just a few hours ago Rolling Stone launched a free stream of Peter Gabriel’s latest, Live Blood, which doesn’t officially come out until next week. The album, recorded live at London’s Hammersmith Apollo last March, is a sprawling double-disc opportunity for the legendary songwriter to preen in front of a live audience. These arrangements of songs from 2011′s New Blood and 2010′s Scratch My Back, with the added “benefit” of a 46-piece orchestra, prove to be a case-study in overindulgence.

The real issue with Live Blood is that we’ve heard the material before. These arrangements are not significant improvements on the re-imaginings we’ve already heard on his two most recent albums. Set the gigantic orchestra aside and there’s little left but a bloated money grab.

It isn’t even particularly relevant as a live album, since we already have Peter Gabriel Plays Live, which showcases his music when in his touring prime. That double LP remains among the best rock recordings ever put to vinyl. Live Blood, however, leaves the most energetic songs for the end, to be heard only by the most ardent fans. “Apres Moi,” his Regina Spektor cover, hints of the raw power the orchestra could provide. But it isn’t until we reach “Red Rain,” “Solsbury Hill” and “In Your Eyes” near the end of the second disc that the album comes anywhere near success.

Perhaps it is time for Peter Gabriel to put aside his greatest hits and get to work on a proper follow-up to 2002′s Up, his most recent stab at new material. These orchestral indulgences only back up the theory that the living legend hasn’t done anything of consequence since 1986′s So. Long-time fans will know that isn’t the case. Still, it’s a shame to see someone with such untapped potential to innovate choosing merely to tread water. When an artist can’t let go of his past, he’s doomed to forever miss out on the future.

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Posted at 2:05 pm on April 19th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Tupac To The Future

It wasn’t nothin’ but a gangsta party when Tupac stormed the stage at Coachella last weekend to take part in a relative orgy of west coast hop-hop nostalgia.

Of course the long-dead rapper did so as a three-dimensional hologram. Whether you see this as Star Wars meets Hip Hop or merely an ill-advised, unnecessary stunt, let technophiles quibble about the quality of the hologram.

What’s interesting will be the future discussions of the implications of this concept. Who, after all, wouldn’t want to see the Beatles put together a full reunion tour, or the Who with Keith Moon back behind the drums?

It is often difficult to differentiate Tupac’s many posthumous album releases from each other, since the rapper is more prolific dead than he was alive. So imagine for a moment the day when his estate decides to release an album of new material and send Hologram ‘Pac on the road to perform the material “live” from beyond the grave.

Rock and roll history is littered with musicians who lived hard and died young. The blurring of life and death made possible through technology should at least give us a moment’s pause. It may soon be possible for fans to pay to see favorite rock stars rise from the dead for one last performance.

But we should at least question why we’d truly want to.

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Posted at 9:00 am on April 17th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

The Bee Gees’ Robin Gibb In a Coma in London

Rolling Stone and other media sources report today that the BeeGees’ Robin Gibb lies in a coma at a London hospital, suffering from pneumonia, “seriously ill” according to the legendary singer’s son. Gibb has long been in poor health, undergoing surgery for liver cancer in March. Gibb remains active in the world of music, recently releasing his album The Titanic Requiem, an orchestral work uniting him with his son RJ as the two performed with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the RSVP Voices choir.

You can hear a performance of the song “Don’t Cry Alone” from the new album below, along with a medley of the Bee Gees’ most famous hits, performed by the band during its 1997 induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

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Posted at 4:57 pm on April 14th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Why Martin Scorsese’s Hugo Should Win Best Picture

When was the last time you looked at a movie with pure wonder?

Heading into Sunday’s Oscar telecast, one category considered a lock is Best Picture. Seven pictures might compete but only one (The Artist) continues to generate serious buzz. That’s a real shame, because the best film I saw this year, Martin Scorsese’s Hugo, received a nomination but seems unlikely to score anything beyond technical awards. And while mainstream audiences will find Hugo more accessible than The Artist, they have yet to realize it.

Perhaps we can forgive Academy voters for feeling there’s no reason to pay much attention to Hugo – aside from the double-fistful of nominations the film received. They’ve already handed Scorsese his lifetime achievement award via the Best Director honor he won for The Departed. So any recognition for Hugo comes as mere gravy for a director already lauded as a master. This thinking, however, refuses to judge Hugo on its own merits.

Based on the book The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick and set in Paris in 1931, Hugo starts with tragedy: the title character (Asa Butterfield) orphaned when his master clockmaker father dies in a museum fire.

This leaves Hugo to live within the walls and secret passages of the railway station Gare Montparnasse, setting the many clocks and stealing what parts he can to finish building an automaton he and his father began restoring.

Hugo begins as a Dickensian orphan but later emerges as a talented mechanical genius who shares his father’s love for the machines they build together. George Méliès (Ben Kingsley) starts out as a potential villain for Hugo, but develops into a man who lives his life hiding his past as a filmmaker. Hugo discovers a love of film and imparts it to Méliès’ granddaughter Isabelle; the two then show her father how much of an impact his early creations had.

In the relationship between Hugo and Méliès the film shines brighter than any of the others I’ve seen this year. Méliès first sees Hugo as nothing more than a thief, but by the time the credits roll the two develop a deep bond.

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Posted at 2:30 pm on February 24th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Country Alternatives: 10 Reasons To Change Your Mind About Hating Twang

No need to fear -- there's more to country than what radio would have you believe.

It’s safe to say country music gets a bad rap. Sure, having grown up in the heartland, there’s the safe argument that this critic is more than a bit biased, but hear me out: there’s a lot more to country music than you’ll ever hear on your local Clear Channel station. And when it comes to contemporary music with its lyrical finger on the pulse of life in America as we see it in 2012, there’s little out there which can rival the honesty of a good country song. You just have to dig for something a little more “alternative” to the mainstream drivel. There’s not a Taylor Swift to be found on this list – rather, the emphasis is on variety, which is both the spice of life and the ultimate ingredient in the best music you’ve spent way too long being afraid to enjoy.

#10 – Middle Brother

With lead vocals drawing heavily on early Neil Young, this alternative country super-group features members of Deer Tick, Dawes and Delta Spirit. The combination of three top-notch singer songwriters into one group makes for the ultimate headphone fix, and their self-titled debut out last year is one of those keepers you find yourself pulling out time and again when you need country-tinged rock with real soul and grit.

You can’t go wrong with either of their initial bands either, but throw these three together and the result is hard to ignore.

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Posted at 9:00 am on February 23rd, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Beyond Lionizing the Dead: Why Whitney Houston Matters

Remembering Whitney Houston means more than deifying her.

As Americans, we tend to be a celebrity-obsessed culture. We constantly prowl for the next big thing, and when we find it we latch on with all our strength and demands for perfection. This can lead to incredible rises, but more often the resulting crash is just as precipitous. In our modern musical landscape, the booms and busts often happen quickly, but not long ago the biggest stars in the business shone so brightly that they dominated the landscape across numerous genres.

Regardless of how you look at it, Whitney Houston was one of those superstars who left a colossal imprint on the music world during her quick rise to fame. Like Michael Jackson, she paved the way for a generation of young black women to make their way in the world of popular music. While Jackson broke MTV wide open for young black men, that door had remained obstinately closed for women of the same age. Then Whitney put Houston, just 22 at the time, on the global music map, conquering radio and television to become one of the biggest star-making vehicles of all time. Rolling Stone and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame named the album one of the 500 greatest of all time, and it launched her voice into the top echelon of great female voices.

That doesn’t make Houston’s death such a critical loss. Neither, really, is the fact that she’s one of the biggest-selling female artists of all time, and by far the most “awarded” of her or any generation. What stands out above all else is how widely she influenced music over the ensuing 25 years. Houston recorded seven studio albums and played a major role in several of the biggest soundtracks of the ’90s while building her career in film. But her magnificent voice directly influenced Mariah Carey and Celine Dion in the ’90s, setting a template for virtually every major female R&B singer of the current generation in one way or another.

Above all her voice will be her legacy. “Her voice is a mammoth, coruscating cry,” wrote Rolling Stone in 2008, when naming her among the 100 greatest singers of all time. “Few vocalists could get away with opening a song with 45 unaccompanied seconds of singing, but Houston’s powerhouse version of Dolly Parton’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ is a tour-de-force.” Dubbed the Queen of Pop for her influence on adult-contemporary pop in the ’90s, she was one of those few singers who could build a tour on little more than her voice, not needing the trappings of a contemporary touring show. A pop diva in every sense of the word, when Whitney sang people listened. Even when recording something as traditional as our national anthem, she blew away the competition and proved that well-known melody could be as worthy of top ten status as any other song.

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Posted at 10:24 pm on February 16th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

5 Things I Learned While Live-Blogging the Grammys

Like most of America, I’ve spent plenty of time badmouthing the Grammys over the past few years without pausing to reflect much on the fact that I rarely watch the show. So this year would have to be different. The wife and I sat down and braved the three-plus hour spectacle to see if Adele could single-handedly save a moribund award show on sheer moxie alone, even while performing for the first time since undergoing vocal chord surgery. Hey, she’s “saved” the record industry with her album 21, hasn’t she? Why should the Grammys be different?

Here are five things which we learned in abundance from this year’s telecast (not counting the fact that the show could have easily been trimmed by an hour without missing a beat).

#5. Adele has to be the most unassuming superstar in years.

Adele appearing on 60 Minutes prior to the Grammy telecast.

She still sees herself as an underdog, despite having sold three times as many albums last year as her next closest competitor. And she proved that her voice is truly enough when she had the balls to come out tonight and make her first performance since her vocal chord surgeries take place in front of millions. More important, she knocked the ball out of the park, laying bare a powerhouse performance at the heart of the show which was only approached in quality by the Whitney Houston tribute later in the hour by Jennifer Hudson. Adele was by far the biggest winner of the night in more ways than awards can quantify. And if there’s much market she hasn’t saturated with 21 prior to the show, it’s only clearer now that once she actually gets to hit the road and tour to support it, the album’s only going to get bigger.

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Posted at 12:32 pm on February 13th, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

Overexposed: Lana Del Rey, Saturday Night Live, and How Indie Music Hype Cannibalizes Its Young

Lana Del Rey: Indie music critics are turning on their supposed "next big thing."

Lana Del Rey has been built up over the last few months as the great white hope for music in 2012, a songwriter with the creativity to push herself in a unique direction while crafting music with hooks that are timeless and unforgettable. She’s “the gangster Nancy Sinatra,” a sultry musical minx who pouts her lips and controls the world.

Two weeks before her album Born To Die was set to release, she became the second artist to appear as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live who had not yet actually issued an album. She was a YouTube sensation, a modern example of where internet marketing can get you.

Hours after her performance, however, the ground was shaking beneath her career as a backlash mounted and the internet which built her up began rabidly tearing her down.

To get a better idea of what happened, it’s worth taking a look at a sketch which had aired earlier in the episode of SNL called “You Can Do Anything.” Vanessa Bayer and Bill Hader are hosts of a talk show touting the modern generation of YouTube sensations. “Now, thanks to technology, and everyone being huge pussies about everything, it doesn’t matter if you have skills or training or … experience, you can do it!” Hader says, describing a trio of inept performers who all feel they’re more famous than they truly are.

The rise of Lana Del Rey mirrors that sketch in a way which makes it seem oddly prescient in regard to what was coming when the singer would soon take the stage to perform her biggest hit to date, “Video Games.” She’d worked under her birth name, Lizzie Grant, for years and even got a recording deal with an independent label, but when “Video Games” became a hit on YouTube, she soon found herself signed to Interscope Records, which gave her the ability to fully eliminate the Lizzie Grant background details and fully become Lana Del Rey. Then the press run began, building her up relentlessly as the next big thing in music, when really her only experience had been in the studio.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. If you’re good at making videos, in an arena where you can tweak things until they’re exactly the version of your inner thoughts you want to release to the world, that’s perfectly reasonable. So is recording music in a studio, where a good singer can sound confident and assured, never having to step outside her comfort zone.

But on a live stage – particularly SNL’s live stage, appearing before millions on an iconic television show where image and sound don’t always blissfully mix – there’s not always a guarantee that you’ll get it right. One take, in front of a live audience, can make or break your carefully crafted public image. In the space of ninety minutes, a carefully built world where Lana Del Rey could be considered one of 2012′s surest things becomes one where the two-week wait to actually hear her debut album becomes a gauntlet she’ll have to run, hoping that she can survive the backlash and emerge at the other end unscathed.

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Posted at 1:38 pm on January 23rd, 2012 by Jonathan Sanders

The 20 Best Songs of 2011 You (Probably) Haven’t Heard

There's plenty of amazing music from the past year you still likely didn't hear.

Though many still argue that 2011 was a year with below average music dominated by a few bands of dubious distinction, those of us who consistently dig through the underground know differently. For “genre whores” like me, 2011 was an unbelievable success, with bands of varied persuasions proving that just because an artist lacks success it often has little to do with whether their music’s amazing. This list is for those sick of hearing about the latest pop superstars, the winners of reality shows, and the makers of disposable pop trifles. These are twenty songs I think are the best indicators of where 2011 went and where 2012 could go if we keep clawing our way beneath the skin-thin surface of what radio-pop force-feeds us. And though it’s not an exhaustive list of every excellent piece of music I’ve heard and treasured this year, it’s a hell of a way to start the discussion. Dig in!

#20. Will Currie and the Country French – “City”

Will Currie and the Country French prove there must be something special in the Canadian water supply to explain the nation’s ability to produce an incredible variety of music across genres. In this case, Currie and company take on piano pop in the vein of Ben Folds, and this six-piece band delights in twisting the musical knife into your brain as you listen, helpless to stop from singing along and relishing the oddly syncopated time signature. They’re still so obscure this is the best online version of the song I can provide, but rest assured, this is a band fully capable of going mainstream with the right promotion. So enjoy them before they get steamrolled by commercial expectations.

#19. Alexander – “Truth”

Taking a break from his role as the leader of Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros, Alex Ebert arrived early in 2011 with this fully-formed solo pop nugget. Opening with whistling over drums and a shambling, easy-going melody, Ebert bursts into frame with his vocals and the song’s officially in overdrive. Clearly this one’s inspired by modern reggae-pop in the vein of Matisyahu, with vocals akin to the laid-back slur of Citizen Cope. It’s by far the best song on the album. It stands so far above the rest of the material on Alexander that fans of the song will feel the album’s blatant genre-hopping is merely inscrutable bait and switch. That said, it’s a strong enough song that it’s worth remembering long after you forget the rest of his schizophrenic musical output.

#18. Great Caesar – “Everyone’s a VIP to Someone”

We’ve been prime for a ska revival since the third wave fizzled out in the late 90s, and Great Caesar is ready to pick up that mantle and run with it. The song is upbeat, blisteringly catchy and addictive as hell. And the band deserves mention for going their own way, building a fanbase from the ground up, maintaining full control over what they produce. Plus you’ve got to love the full horn section which takes on full focus two minutes in. For fans of the more ska-leaning tracks of bands like the Mighty Mighty Bosstones or Cherry Poppin’ Daddies, Great Caesar is a refreshing breath of fresh air. Who says Brooklyn’s only got room for hip-hop?

#17. Baby Teardrops – “Smooth Sailing Ahead”

Baby Teardrops is perfect music for fans of jangle pop who are looking for the next best alternative now that R.E.M. has broken up for good. The songs on their debut, X is for Love, are bare-bones from a melodic standpoint, choosing a few chords and running with it, as the band builds hooks on the power of repetition. “Smooth Sailing Ahead” was one of several early singles from the album, and its chorus, repeatedly echoing the title of the song over crunching guitars and drums, is the ultimate garage pop antidote to lame, overly commercialized drivel. The rest of the album does an equal job of getting to the point, letting the hooks do the talking, setting Baby Teardrops up to be among the most interesting new bands of the year who nobody got the chance to hear.

#16. Noah and the Whale – “Tonight’s the Kind of Night”

Noah and the Whale is one of those bands which forces you to look beyond expectations. They folllowed up on 2009′s The Last Days of Spring, one of the finest post-breakup albums since Fleetwood Mac’s Rumors, with this year’s Last Night On Earth, which plays out as the most earnest Springsteen tribute ever to come from a bunch of artsy Brits. “Tonight’s The Kind of Night” sums up the album’s thesis perfectly, with a sense of lyrical verisimilitude which you’ll be hard-pressed to find anywhere else. Plus, the backdrop to those lyrics hooks you so immediately upon first pressing play that it’s damned near impossible to get the chorus out of your head once you hear it. “Tonight’s the kind of night where everything could change,” Charlie Fink sings, and though you suspect making that change could prove difficult, the song’s upbeat nature suggests it is more than worthwhile to push yourself to find success rather than waiting around for things to happen to you.

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Posted at 2:04 am on December 22nd, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

How Musicians Use Social Media to Bite The Hand That Feeds

Not looking fondly back through the rear-view, Mike Doughty is now taking his hate for Soul Coughing directly to individual fans via Twitter

It’s a fact of life that at some point in the creative process we all lose control of our work to those who actually consume it. Once I put the finishing touches upon a music review or piece of commentary, my portion of the creative process is complete; it is up to readers to decide what to make of it. But it’s easy to forget sometimes that for all the meaning we ascribe to our favorite songs, their creators may have had completely different associations with the work.

Ask any band that struggled to find succcess, happened upon a hit single out of nowhere, and then just as quickly was sloughed back to obscurity. You’ll hear a similar tale. That same band might go on for ten more years writing perfectly workmanlike music but they’ll forever have their name and musical reputation tied to that song which made it. So what happens when, decades on, you’re ready to admit as an artist that the music you’re known for is complete rubbish?

At a certain point the artist’s creation moves beyond his or her control, and becomes the property of the listeners who define its real value or meaning.

All of which makes this critic wonder: is there a point where artists should step back, shut up, and admit that, while they may hate something they recorded in their past, it has meaning to the fans, and therefore there’s a value to not dumping artistic baggage on music beloved to fans?

Apparently Mike Doughty has pondered that question and decided that the answer is a resounding no.

Doughty has spent the last decade writing low-key pop music in an acoustic vein, twisting bits of electronica into his sound as he sing-raps songs like “Looking At The World From The Bottom Of A Well” and “Na Na Nothing.” And he’s been lucky enough to be able to continue to make a living in the world of music, despite the fact that he left Soul Coughing (the band which made him famous in the first place) more than a decade ago. Still, hearing fans request Soul Coughing songs at his shows has apparently aggravated him so much he’s reduced himself to lashing out at fans individually on Twitter:

"No, I really hate green eggs and ham!" Doughty's pre-Thanksgiving tweets re: Soul Coughing

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Posted at 10:35 am on December 19th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

Coldplay’s Mylo Xyloto and Why Sometimes Pop is Just Pop

Coldplay's Mylo Xyloto may be 2011's most misunderstood pop gem.

Expectations can be a beast in the world of music criticism. Bands can blow up overnight thanks to blog reviews, even when they don’t have an album to promote – the live shows are that good. Then, when the album drops and it isn’t as magnificent as people expected, the band is dropped like a hot potato, while sites like Pitchfork leap to the next flavor of the week they can’t help hyping to death.

The dreaded sophomore slump isn’t so much named for a significant drop in quality or artistic vision, but rather for the frequent sales drop-off when fans don’t like a band’s second album as much as the one they worshiped maybe a year prior. Worse is the fate doled out to bands who initially sound like another popular act; they initially get a benefit from that comparison, only to have fans turn on them when their music either doesn’t follow closely enough in the footsteps of the iconic act, or conversely fails by following too closely with the original.

Such has been the fate of Coldplay, a band which clearly can’t win for losing.

If you were to spend too much time reading what the majority of the criticsphere has to say about Mylo Xyloto, the latest Coldplay album, you’d have to wonder if this one collection of songs happened to be the worst thing to happen to music since Kevin Federline’s rap abortion. “It’s a bit uplifting, but ultimately insipid,” was the write-up they received in the UK’s Observer, while the Guardian referred to the album as “standard issue Coldplay” in the perjorative, as though a band’s fifth album sounding like anything recorded prior to its release is somehow a brutal disservice to all appropriately cultured music fans.

It’s almost been a competition to see who can damn the album with the faintest praise. You see, what’s worse than a sophomore slump is the brutal crash to earth which comes when a band previously christened as a “hipster alternative to pop” decides to continue recording pop music long after the hipsters have decided to throw said band to the dogs.

I, for one, was never a particularly huge fan of Coldplay. “Yellow,” off their debut Parachutes, bored me to tears with its repetition and was doomed by radio overplay. And A Rush of Blood to the Head, the band’s sophomore effort, featured solid songs but frequently seemed to this critic as though the band was trying too hard to come up with songs to match what radio wanted from a follow-up to Parachutes. That, and the band was fighting to avoid becoming overly pretentious. While many have always lumped them in with the 90s brit-pop of Oasis and the rousing stadium rock of U2, with others clamoring for Chris Martin to follow in Thom Yorke’s avant-garde footsteps, the band was merely at the time trying to find its own voice and follow its own path.

Over the last eight or nine years, however, the band has grown on me. They’ve proven to be willing to push the envelope and try experiments with style, while sticking primarily to the world of pop music. While Radiohead saw a chance to go mainstream with the uber-success of OK Computer and then turned 180 degrees in the opposite direction, choosing to avoid pop at all costs, Coldplay wants to be the pop band everyone likes, with hooks that stick in your head and won’t leave, like tiny musical viruses. They finally found songs that led in that direction on Viva La Vida, which had a title signaling pretension even as the music was more mainstream than ever: I dare you to keep the tribal hook that is “Lost!” out of your head once it sneaks in.

NEXT: Why Mylo Xyloto is far from the abomination critics have made it seem.

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Posted at 4:17 am on November 26th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

So You Think You Hate Punk Rock: The Five Bands That Will Change Your Mind

There's a lot more to Punk Rock than what meets the eye

Punk Rock in its truest form developed in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia, each region independent of knowledge of the other due to the difficulty at the time of following distant scenes in the era prior to global radio and the Internet. Each Punk scene at the time developed its own take on the concept, though for the most part there was a shared distaste for the “excesses” of ’70s mainstream rock.

For that reason, bands began speeding up their music, cutting down songs to their barest essence. Short songs, stripped-down arrangements, and often political lyrics gave Punk Rock its traditional sound. But it was a short-lived development, as Punk Rock gave way to harder-edged music in the ’80s including hardcore, while diverging to provide room for post-Punk, alternative rock, and eventually the grunge movement of the ’90s.

If you’re looking for an entry-point as a listener to discover what set Punk Rock apart from the rest, and why the music of a four-year period has managed to remain distinctive in itself while managing to influence artists as disparate as Nirvana, the Pixies, and Green Day, this is the article for you. This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list, and I’m not looking to focus on the most obscure bands. This is for those of you who think you hate Punk Rock without ever having actually had a chance to dig into it. These five bands made their impact on the Punk scene during its most active period, paving the way for countless others even as the scene eventually self-destructed.

#5 — RADIO BIRDMAN

Radio Birdman formed in Sydney, Australia, in 1974, and influenced the work of many of Australia’s best-known bands of the ’80s and beyond, making them one of the more critical bands leading to the eventual development of a rock scene in Australia. Their early music didn’t fit at all with what was being played in the pub scene at the time, so the band found a pub in Taylor Square, Sydney, took over its management, and renamed it the Oxford Fun House. Opening the club up to bands of similar ilk to themselves, Radio Birdman singlehandedly built up a Punk Rock scene with a unique aesthetic. The band’s debut EP Burn My Eye got to the attention of music critics well outside the Australian purview, twisting the sounds of Detroit bands like MC5 and The Stooges into what would eventually be described as Punk Rock. Though they’re not particularly well-known outside Australia, their early work features numerous examples of what made ’70s era Punk Rock great.

Next: How punk reinvented “Leader of the Pack”…

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Posted at 1:00 am on November 20th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

Moneyball and the Four Biggest Myths of a ‘Dying’ Music Industry

If the industry execs had it their way, we'd be still be buying albums on vinyl.

Late in the film Moneyball, Brad Pitt’s Billy Beane sits for an interview with the owner of the Boston Red Sox, and he’s told that it’s always the first through the wall who suffers the bloody defeat. Baseball’s elite weren’t angry with him over fear he’d destroy the game, a laughably impossible thought. They were afraid that he was going to eliminate their livelihood, as they’d put decades into winning the game a certain way. Get in the way of that set-in-stone attitude, as Beane had done with the Oakland A’s in 2002, and you were asking for trouble.

As I watched that scene unfold, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the way the music industry has treated nearly every technological evolution in the last forty years. Any change in the way people chose to partake in music affected the way the industry executives who sat atop the mountain were able to secure their paychecks. Whether it was the advent of cassette recordings — which many feared would destroy the vinyl record once fans realized they could tape albums and share them with their friends — to the creation of mp3 recordings and the genie-less bottle which is the Internet, the industry has forever been behind the curve, fighting to sustain soon-to-be-dead sales models.

It’s a process as old as time: new products come along which challenge profitable products which have provided job security across the spectrum of an industry. Those who already have achieved success don’t want change; they want profits to continue to pour in with as little outside interference as possible. New ideas involve risk, risk involves potential loss, and potential loss means failure. And few industries are as risk-failure averse as the world of music executives.

Myth #1: “Thanks to iTunes, we’ll never have another “Dark Side of the Moon”!”

I hear it every day that the mp3 player and eventually the advent of the iTunes Store are responsible for killing off the album as an art form. Supposedly, thanks to the inventors of the mp3 codec back in the late ’80s, illegal downloaders in the ’90s and ’00s, and Steve Jobs in 2004, we’re now back to 1964 and the era of early Beatlemania, when singles ruled the roost and albums were an afterthought.

The problem with this false reasoning is that though singles are certainly alive and well, so are albums. We’re just not purchasing them on CDs. Just because casual listeners can go and buy random tracks off the latest Arcade Fire album doesn’t mean that anyone at iTunes is telling such bands not to record full-length albums. Rather, fans simply are being given a choice. Rather than having to shell out for a full album prior to hearing any of the music, we now have the opportunity to graze first, discover if an artist is producing music in which we’d like to further invest. If we like what we hear, we can buy the full album — and many do.

Furthermore, bands on the cutting edge are able to use campaigns through sites like Kickstarter, which go directly to fans to help fund the production of albums in a setting akin to the idea of commissioning a work as a patron of the arts. If a band wants to work on a concept album akin to “Dark Side of the Moon” and they fear there’s perhaps not as wide an audience for it as there could have been in the past, the band can recruit like-minded listeners to help fund the release. If successful, the album can then go on to the wider audience as a whole, allowing such a concept album to flourish.

In other words, comparing CD sales to full-album sales on iTunes and then saying that the sales of singles are cannibalizing the album as an art form is delusional. You’re comparing apples to oranges and perpetuating the idea that the only way an album can be an album is if it’s produced in hard-copy and sold for $18.95 MSRP.

Next: Captain Jack Sparrow Vs. Record Industry Executives’ Paychecks.

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Posted at 12:00 am on October 27th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

How Steve Jobs’ iPod and iTunes Revolutionized Music

Without Steve Jobs, would digital music have caught fire?

It has become popular to contribute to the conversation regarding Steve Jobs’ death with a solemn sense of deification. How do you put into perspective the life’s work of a man who almost single-handedly took control of the modern marketing of music by making it possible to carry a lifetime’s worth of music in the palm of your hand?

In my case it’s a little more difficult, considering the sobering fact that – and some of you out there may consider this a form of heresy – I have never owned an iPod, an iPhone, or an iPad. But the impact of all three, and the advent of iTunes, affected how I consume music even now. The gulf between how I access music now compared to even a decade ago is astoundingly wide.

I can thank Steve Jobs’ unique vision for that.

What’s amazing about Jobs’ work with Apple during his “second coming” is that, even for those of us who never took the plunge and bought his signature products, his modernizations have dominated the musical landscape since the start of the new millennium. We can’t help but speak of him and his work, even when we chose to use products from the many others who rushed to copy his vision of an alternative to the “big and clunky or small and useless” attempts at putting electronic music files in the pockets of everyone in America.

Being from rural southern Indiana, my community didn’t get full use of the Internet until I was a junior in high school. So prior to that late date, I had little use for a home computer beyond typing endless term papers and other ephemera. I cobbled together my first home computer during my senior year and, with the benefit of a slow dial-up modem, I stumbled on the earliest versions of Napster. From that moment my love of mp3s and portable music was born, and my appetite for new music was insatiable.

The problem was, there were few ways to use those mp3s other than just ripping CDs and remixing them, creating endless streams of mix-tapes. I’d purchased an mp3 CD player when I left for college, thinking it would be convenient to burn discs of nothing but mp3s, that one player could play simply by reading it like a normal CD. But the player was terribly designed, and its eye could barely handle reading the mp3s to the point where I spent most of my time praying that I’d be able to get to class without the CD becoming scratched.

Jobs changed that with the launch of the iPod which left all prior forms of portable music devices in the dust. Even then, however, the portable player was primarily a way to store and carry your already existing collection of music ripped from CDs, or to partake of the many less-than-legal online options which still were in vogue.

I honestly never thought the record companies would get their acts together and license anyone to put the music for sale online in these formats, especially after they shut down Napster and watched the Internet spring up with so many unstoppable copycats once the masses were driven underground. It seemed far more likely that each label would choose its own “favorite” start-up, and you’d never be able to find that one place where you could locate all the music you wanted to consume. We’d have wound up with ten or twenty warring download sites, none of which would have offered half of what the music fans really wanted.

Somehow Jobs managed to do just that, however, getting the labels to agree to support his site and provide virtual one-stop music shopping for the digital world. With the launch of iTunes, to which even I was not immune, he took firm control of the direction of the music industry for the remainder of the decade. Album sales continued to decline, but the music of seemingly everyone was immediately at our fingertips for less than a dollar per song. That’s where his true genius was able to shine – Jobs knew that for people to adopt the new technology, they needed to have a player they’d want to carry around and show off, one which looked as good as it worked. But more than that, for such a player to truly take off, people needed to be able to buy the music.

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Posted at 12:34 pm on October 20th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

The Five Secret Ingredients for the Perfect Pop Song

The Everly Brothers knew what made for an iconic pop hook.

When it comes to truly universal pop songwriting, there are elements which separate the golden pop nuggets from the disposable, future residents of the discount bin. While the pop consciousness is always shifting and evolving, specific elements have remained important staples through the decades. These qualities stand out and create the memorable from amongst otherwise ephemeral pop wonders.

While there’s no formula to crafting a perfect pop hook, the presence of these elements can make or break a song’s impact.

Editor’s recommendation: Start playing each youtube video as you begin reading Jonathan’s description of why the song is a success.

5. Say it and get out.

There’s a reason why some of the more memorable pop songs of the fifties and sixties were short and to the point. Stripping away the padding and breaking a song down to its bare essentials can help make it ultimately more memorable. “Bye Bye Love” by the Everly Brothers was barely over two minutes in length, and it made enough of an impact to become one of the best-known pop hits of their era.

Del Amitri’s massive hit “Roll To Me” in 1995 took a page from that handbook, coupling an innately catchy melody with bare-bones lyrics, getting in and out in two minutes as well. The band has referred to the song as a “throwaway” pop song, but its minimalist nature helped it stick out from the crowd.

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Posted at 12:00 am on October 13th, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

R.E.M’s Five Most Essential Albums

: R.E.M. may have broken up, but there’s still the music.

Together for thirty years, R.E.M.’s greatest albums showcase the Athens, Georgia, legends’ incredible artistic progression for what it was — a true Rock rarity. They also serve as a welcome introduction to the rest of the band’s deep discography. Though there’s plenty of great writing about what the band’s music means to contemporary listeners in relation to their breakup earlier this week, I prefer to focus on the music itself to see what made R.E.M. stand apart from the crowd.

These five albums have proven to be the ones I’ve gone back to most often, the albums which provide the best look at what the band had to offer musically, where they’ve been and where we’re left now that there will be no sixteenth album. These may not be the albums you’d expect from a critic, since we’re supposed to prefer only the “indie” releases, shying away from respecting the hits which saw “mainstream” success, leading to the band’s inevitable demise. As a listener I don’t feel there’s a need for “guilty” pleasures, and in the case of R.E.M. the singles are as much a part of why they’ll be remembered as are the indie albums that built their success to the point where multi-platinum success was a reality.

Few bands in the modern rock or alternative landscape have managed to craft such a diverse discography, so many albums which managed to build upon each other, creating mainstream success through recording, touring and then living the music and letting it live through them. Though R.E.M. will be remembered for their singles, a look back through the band’s strongest albums shows that their music was always built on a strong recognition of pop hooks and songwriting. The band has left us with fifteen albums which cement their legacy, leaving plenty of room for future exploration. Their influence on the world of rock and alternative is far from over.

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#5 — Accelerate (2008)

R.E.M. was forced to transition to being a trio when drummer Bill Barry left the band in the late 90s, and though they attempted to carry on with experimentations with drum-machines on Up, R.E.M.’s early 2000s albums (Reveal and Around The Sun) showed they were floundering creatively. The latter album actually failed to even go Gold in the United States, the first album since Document put them into the stratosphere, to fail to do so.

Thankfully, Accelerate, their 14^th studio album was a complete turnaround — the band seemed reinvigorated, accelerating their sound by returning to the garage rock of their late 80s / early 90s work. It was immediately clear from the up-tempo opening track “Living Well Is The Best Revenge,” as Michael Stipe piled on the garage-rock hooks to push their sound back to the underground days of their first four albums, while emphasizing their studio abilities in the strong production values. “I’m not one to sit and spin,” he growls, “because living well is the best revenge!” Indeed. Accelerate was a tight 11-track album which proved you can go back again.

(Must Hear: “Living Well Is The Best Revenge”, “Houston”, “Supernatural Superserious”)

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Posted at 4:14 pm on September 23rd, 2011 by Jonathan Sanders

Four Emerging Artists on Music’s Cutting Edge

Helga Esteb / Shutterstock.com

If there’s one thing we should learn from the runaway success of Adele’s 21 this year, it’s that regardless of pop music trends, the most innovative, interesting music always finds its way to the top. This year may have seen its share of Katy Perrys and Lady Gagas who seem to leech every ounce of their fame from what moments they get in the media spotlight, but their albums live or die based on the next hot single. Adele’s music lives on its timeless nature; it could have been released any time in the last three decades and it would have found an audience, because the music stands head and shoulders above the mere hype.

And let me tell you, 2011 has been a year filled with amazing releases which prove that, while radio still tells us singles rule the world, audiences are telling radio they’ll gravitate to great albums if the music is there to support their demand. I submit for your approval these four artists who are currently making waves in the underground, all of whom deserve wider acclaim. They come from different musical corners, but all feature challenging elements which make them typical hard sells in the world of radio. Yet they’re producing music beyond the reach of their contemporaries, and those listeners among you who are willing to do some exploring will certainly find plenty to relish here.

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Gabriel Kahane
Orchestral Pop

Merging elements of Rufus Wainwright’s pop flair with Sufjan Stevens’ sense of cinematic orchestral arrangements, Gabriel Kahane seems poised to assert himself as this decade’s first truely avant-garde pop tunesmith worthy of note. He’s emerged as a leading voice among young composers, innovating both classical and pop norms to create a style which, as cliché as it may sound, seems uniquely his own.

On Where Are The Arms, his deft touch is evident on songs like the album’s opener, “Charming Disease,” which features an unnerving description of the effects of runaway alcoholism remarkably melded to a time-shifting melody of piano and strings which proves utterly intoxicating. Adventurous listeners on both the classical and pop sides of the coin are going to find themselves infatuated with Kahane’s vision for the future of the craft, if they take the time to give these songs a thorough listen.

Hear More: http://gabrielkahane.com