“Reputation” by Taylor Swift

The followup to Taylor Swift’s world-conquering, Grammy-winning smash hit 1989, this album came after a two-year hiatus in which curiosity about this megastar’s next release reached an absolutely fevered pitch even from those who didn’t like her music. Despite this, the album proved bitterly divisive even among her fans upon its release, but judging from the album itself, I imagine that was exactly what Swift was going for.

Let me explain. Swift, whatever her detractors may say about her, is exceptionally smart, and she knew that almost anything she released after 1989 was going to feel like a letdown (look at what happened with Adele’s 25, for example). She was smart enough to know that the only way to win that game was not to play…to play a different game instead, and do something that absolutely no-one was expecting. To this end, she released a difficult, complex, almost avant-garde album, and the fact that it failed to match the Pop success of 1989 is a reflection on its intentions rather than its quality. To use an analogy from the greatest Pop musicians from another era, 1989 was her Sgt. Pepper, and Reputation is her White Album.

The album’s sound is largely built on the best and most ambitious song from 1989, “Out of the Woods”. The bulk of this album uses the same mix of sorrowful lyricism and creative dissonance that made that song so unique, only here the sounds are much more chaotic and discordant than they were on the earlier song. This makes sense, as this entire album is built on chaotic and discordant emotions…1989 was an album about clarity and self-acceptance, while this is an album about righteous anger and vulnerability. The music is a mix of harsh, discordant, even deliberately ugly sounds and blissful lyricism, but the dark undertones are ever-present,  even on the most ebullient love songs like “Gorgeous” (‘Ocean blue eyes/looking in mine/I think that I might/sink and drown and die’). “…Ready For It”, the opening track, does a fine job of telling the audience what they’re in for, with a dissonant, taunting verse and a chorus that is pure Pop bliss.

The album’s lead single, “Look What You Made Me Do”, while it was an extremely effective way to roll out Swift’s new persona, seems to have led many people to expect a darker album than the one we actually got. A terrifying mix of eerie piano, pounding Hip-Hop beats and hissing whispers, it is easily the scariest of all Swift’s ‘angry’ songs. It was also the first song of her entire career to really embrace the influence of Hip-Hop, even including a bizarre but oddly effective sample of the chorus from Right Said Fred’s Nineties novelty hit “I’m Too Sexy” (the repeated “Look what you made me do” on this song’s chorus is set to the same rhythm, and it manages to make it sound terrifying).

Like 1989 and every other Taylor Swift release since the beginning of the current decade, this is a full-fledged Concept Album. However, while 1989 resembled a miniature musical in the vein of Tommy or Ziggy Stardust, Reputation is built more on the model used by Pink Floyd’ Dark Side of the Moon, with two contrasting ‘sides’, one dealing her lengthy public mistreatment by the media, the second with her most recent relationship and the solace it provided her during that mistreatment. Still, the growth she showed on 1989 is continued here…she still acknowledges her own neuroses, and she still shows willingness to paint herself in an unflattering light in places.

The other really extreme examples of Swift’s ‘new sound’ are both from the first side, “I Did Something Bad” and “Endgame”. The former is a dark, angry, discordant showstopper that is particularly stunning when performed live. The latter is a flat-out Rap song, featuring guests spots by her frequent collaborator Ed Sheeran but also by Pop-Rap superstar Future. This is Swift’s first serious attempt at genuine Rap (her duet with T-Pain, “Thug Story”, doesn’t really count, as it was intended as a parody), and as much of a shock as it must have been to many of her fans, she proves to be surprisingly adroit at it.

But most of the rest of the album is simply blissful, melodic love songs with tinges of darkness under the surface, recognizably different from her earlier work but not to the degree that many expected when they heard the first singles. Granted, even the love songs on the first half (like the eerie invocation of Eighties New-Wave “Don’t Blame Me” or the exquisitely bittersweet “Delicate”) are still darker and more paranoid that most of the second ‘side’. “Delicate” actually became the album’s best-liked single among the amateur “internet” critics, most of whom had apparently never listened to the entire album and thus never knew that most of the album they professed to hate sounded a lot more like the song they liked than it did like the other singles.

As expected, there are several songs specifically targeted at her professional archfoes Kanye West and Kim Kardashian. Some have accused her of pettiness as a result of this, but people were obviously going to read that subtext into anything she released at that time anyway, so I agree with her decision to address it directly. In addition to “Look What You Made Me Do” and “I Did Something Bad”, there’s also the only “angry” song from the second ‘side’, the witheringly sarcastic “This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things”. The latter song isn’t as biting as some of Swift’s earlier lyrical takedowns of her enemies, but it’s easily the funniest of them since “Better Than Revenge” back in 2010.

The rest of the second side is nearly all love songs, whether blissful (“King of My Heart”), bittersweet (“Dancing With Our Hands Tied”), or both (“Call It What You Want”). It even feature the most overtly sexual song that Swift had ever written up to that point in “Dress”, which unlike so many attempts at sexuality by former Teen Pop stars, is tasteful and subtle enough to be genuinely erotic rather than just an embarrassing public spectacle.

This is an unusually straightforward album by Swift’s previous standards. The only track that is really open to interpretation is “Getaway Car”. Now, I tend not to dwell on the significance of Swift’s music to her personal life beyond what she communicates directly (frankly, I think it’s none of my business), but if I had to make a guess, I’d say this was a subtler, more sophisticated version of something like “Back to December”—an expression of regret for something she had done to one of her ex-boyfriends. In any case, it is a thrilling narrative ballad that seems to simultaneously apologize abjectly and shrug off any responsibility, and it probably would have been one of the album’s biggest hits had it actually been released as a single in the U.S. market.

The high point of the album is the sublimely beautiful final song, “New Year’s Day”, which could give “Out of the Woods” some serious competition as the best song of her career. It shows an unheard-of level of maturity for Swift at that point, pledging to be there for the bad times as well as the good, but also essentially saying that if anything should ever force them to separate, “Don’t forget me” and “Don’t be a stranger”. This is in sharp contrast to the angry breakup ballads that characterized Swift’s early work, and it showed that this fresh-faced songwriting prodigy who emerged out of Nashville was finally growing up.

As I said, this album proved bitterly divisive among both critics and fans, but I’m fairly certain Swift was expecting that when she released it. Given her relative stability and level-headedness for a Pop star, I imagine this is the closest thing to John Lennon’s Plastic Ono Band or Michael Jackson’s HIStory that Swift will ever release…that this is her version of the proverbial ‘nervous breakdown’ album.

This seems to be the kind of album that’s going to need a few years to settle down into the status of an acknowledged classic, but I can say with a fair degree of certainty that it’ll get there eventually…indeed, it’s already visibly beginning to happen in some circles. In any case, the people who pillory this album as a “failure” are engaging in wishful thinking because of their own prejudices against the artist…it may not have had the same success on the singles chart as 1989, but “failed” albums don’t end up as Year-End best-sellers. The truth is that with this album and its follow-up Lover, Swift is starting to outgrow the singles chart (much like Beyonce did before her) and become one of those “classic” artists whose albums are generally enjoyed as a unified whole. And this is something to be proud of…remember that Swift has said that her real career role model was Joni Mitchell, and so this was probably her real long-term ambition all along.

“Greatest Hits” by Styx

Styx was not a particularly good band on the whole as Arena Rock acts go, but their overall output is such a complex mix of good and bad that I felt the only way to cover the full spectrum of their output was to review their most prominent Greatest Hits album in full. It’s the first compilation album I’ve ever covered in my album reviews, but again, I felt it was the only way to do justice to the scope of this band’s problems and occasional strengths.

The first problem with Styx as a band is obvious—the group’s primary vocalist sounds like a white Steve Urkel. Dennis DeYoung had his moments as a songwriter, but there are very few less credible Rock vocalists to have actually achieved a major career. Sometimes DeYoung would hand the mike over to his bandmate Tommy Shaw, particularly on Shaw’s own composition, which tend to be far more Rock-edged and which even DeYoung seemed to understand he couldn’t pull off convincingly. But frankly, while Shaw’s compositions tended to be more consistent than DeYoung’s, Shaw’s harsh croak was only slightly preferable to DeYoung’s nasal whine.

The band’s second problem was that they had a frequent tendency to dabble in gooey Soft Rock balladry, and this was a style for which they showed no aptitude whatsoever. Their first hit, “Lady”, was in this style, and in a just world that might have doomed their careers there and then (the song had to be re-recorded for this album due to label issues, but in any form it’s a saccharine embarrassment). Even worse is “Babe”, which somehow became one of their signature hits but which is so tritely-written and badly-sung that the result is indistinguishable from a late-career Chicago single. “Lorelei” is at least marginally better due to have slightly more of a Rock edge, but it’s still pretty unfortunate. And on the opposite side of the spectrum, “Fooling Yourself (The Angry Young Man)” (apparently written by Shaw as a personal dig at DeYoung) and “Miss America” come across as needlessly belligerent and obnoxious.

That said, the band did definitely have its moments…the fact that they’ve retained a significant fanbase in the face of decades of critical scorn is not totally unjustified. DeYoung’s haunting “Suite Madame Blue” and Shaw’s blistering Rocker “Renegade” qualify as Rock classics. And despite their tendency to sound like warmed-over Queen at times, items like “Crystal Ball”, “Blue Collar Man (Long Nights)”, and even the group’s biggest hit, the Prog-lite harmonic showcase “Come Sail Away” do have their pleasures (even if the latter makes its chosen metaphor far less evocative than it had been in Tom Waits’ “Shiver Me Timbers” three years earlier). And while “The Grand Illusion” does exaggerate the group’s trademark bombast more than a little too far, you still have to acknowledge the validity of its message, which seems even more relevant in today’s social-media environment than it was at the time.

The final problem with the band, and the one that ultimately wound up being their undoing, is that their output became progressively sillier toward the end of their initial run of hits. The fact that they decided to start playing up their Prog-Rock influences just as Prog-Rock was forcibly going out of style was a questionable decision to begin with, but the two Prog-style Concept Albums they released in the early Eighties made even the most outrageous excesses of the genre’s Seventies heyday look respectable by comparison.

Their 1981 album Paradise Theater was their biggest hit commercially, but its convoluted Concept (which none of the band members except DeYoung really seemed to be on board with) resulted in some pretty contrived songwriting. The two songs from it included here, “The Best of Times” and “Too Much Time on My Hands”, are attractive enough musically, but they both feature absolutely ridiculous lyrics. “The Best of Times”, a synth ballad reminiscent of late-career ELO, is built around an embarrassingly pretentious and inept appropriation of the opening lines of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Meanwhile, in “Too Much Time on My Hands”, the entire song is built around a common phrase (“Is it any wonder?”) that Tommy Shaw clearly didn’t understand how to use properly, resulting in a confusing, illiterate mess of a lyric.

The album that would ultimately kill the band, though, was the legendary disaster Kilroy Was Here (they would eventually reunite as a kind of nostalgic niche band, but Kilroy was essentially the end of the line for them at hitmakers). There are two singles from that album included here: the second, “Don’t Let It End”, is merely another soppy love ballad when divorced from the album’s context, but the first is the band’s notorious calling card among their legions of detractors…the infamous “Mr. Roboto”. This combination of confusing out-of-context story song, anti-technology screed and repetitive nonsense chorus is probably the most ridiculous Prog-Rock track of all time, and the fact that it actually became a hit is what ultimately doomed the band to their current status as Pop-culture punchlines. I’d complain that it makes no sense outside the album’s story and thus shouldn’t have been released as a single, but frankly, it doesn’t make any more sense if you do know the album’s story.

There is one track from Styx’s “reunion” era included here, “Show Me the Way”, and while it is reasonably pretty, it definitely comes across as something of a diminishing echo of their heyday-era work. This Greatest Hits collection comes off as disappointing on the whole, just as Styx’s overall output did, but it has a few good tracks and at least shows that the band had some measure of talent and weren’t outright bottomfeeders like some of their peers from the era. I can’t really say I recommend this album (or, frankly, this band), but I will give it this: it was never boring, and that’s more than anyone can say for the Greatest Hits of some of the bands that succeeded them.

“Only Visiting This Planet” by Larry Norman

‘Christian Rock’ has a notoriously bad reputation among mainstream music fans (and one that is not entirely undeserved), but it only really acquired that reputation after the homogenized cottage industry of ‘Contemporary Christian Music’ came on the scene in the Eighties. The early ‘Jesus-Rockers’ of the previous decade were essentially just Hippie Rock’n’rollers that happened to have latched onto Christianity (we don’t really think of the movement in that light now, but the actual number of “Hippies for Jesus” back in the day was larger than you might think). This probably has something to do with the fact that these ‘Christian Rockers’ tended to be far more legit musicians than the bland, whitebread acts marketed exclusively toward the Evangelical cultural bubble that have given the genre such a bad name.

Legendary guitarist Phil Keaggy was a prominent member of the genre in its day (he’s still making records, actually, though he’s now switched to more of a Christian-themed New Age Music sound), as was Barry McGuire (of “Eve of Destruction” fame) after his conversion to Christianity. But of all the classic-era Jesus-Rockers, probably the greatest of them all was Larry Norman, and this, his second album and acknowledged Magnum Opus, is probably the most iconic album the genre ever produced…it was added to the Library of Congress, for God’s sake, an almost unheard-of honor for a Christian Rock album.

Granted, for all its unquestionable artistic merit, a lot of this album’s religious content is iffy at best from a theological point of view—Norman was a premillenial dispensationalist, and therefore by definition a bit of a lunatic. But his work is significant in being pretty much the only valid art to come out of that particular religious movement…we’ve gotten some decent stuff from nonbelievers who were merely co-opting the movement’s mythology as fiction (like The Omen), but from the actual devout, we’ve mostly gotten only terrible B-movies and even worse airport fantasy novels.

Also, it’s worth noting that the song from this album that deals most directly with the ideas of the “Rapture” and the “Tribulation”, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready”, strikes a very odd tone compared to, say, the Left Behind series…there’s no triumph here, and virtually no judgment. It just sounds like a grieving, pitying dirge for those ‘left behind’ from a man who believes that God is going to do these things but desperately wishes there was some other way. So it’s hard to object too much on those grounds…indeed, one starts to pity Norman for the sadness his religious worldview seems to be causing him (even if he does appear to have been the first to use the phrase ‘left behind’ in reference to the Rapture on this song).

More to the point, it’s a haunting, beautifully written ballad has all the edge and honesty that modern Christian Rock is so notorious for lacking. The melody is gorgeous and conveys an immense depth of sorrow, and the lyrics are some of the best poetry found in any Rock song this side of Bob Dylan or Leonard Cohen, with such eloquent and memorable turns of phrase as ‘A piece of bread could buy a bag of gold’.

“The Outlaw”, a retelling of the life of Jesus, is arguably even more beautiful in both music and lyrics (though it also refers to Norman’s belief in the Rapture in its final line). The rest of the album isn’t quite up to the level of these two highly polished gems, but it is nonetheless impressive. “Righteous Rocker #1” is a kind of Rock-song paraphrase of the Apostle Paul’s 1 Corinthians 13 (the passage about “If I have not love, I am nothing”), which is a sentiment even many nonreligious people can get behind. “Why Don’t You Look Into Jesus” is a little more exclusively Christian in its sentiments, but most of the self-destructive behaviors he describes on the verses are not terribly controversial examples of the wrong way to live, and if he thinks he can help these people mend their broken lives, I say more power to him. In any case, both songs have definite inspirational punch to their music and lyrics that can be enjoyed regardless of what the listener thinks of the message. And Norman’s defense of his chosen medium, “Why Should the Devil Have All the Good Music?”, is a downright danceable Blues-Rock jam that is infectious enough back up the assertions in the lyrics.

Some of the political content on this album may surprise modern listeners used to the Conservative leanings of modern Evangelicals…after all, Christian or not, Norman was still a hippie, and apart from one line advocating prayer in school, his grand political statement “The Great American Novel” would not have been out of place on an early Dylan album. Frankly, “I Am the Six O’Clock News” hardly even mentions religion, opting instead for bitterly biting social commentary about the callousness of the media, and there are two sad, pretty love songs on the album, “I’ve Got to Learn to Live Without You” and “Pardon Me”, that relate to the album’s religious subject matter only subtextually, if at all.

The only song on the album where the more asinine and self-righteous side of Norman’s religious convictions really comes to the forefront is the last track, “Reader’s Digest”. The implied homophobia and transphobia in the first two lines (about Alice Cooper’s crossdressing and David Bowie’s androgynous persona, respectively), while they would probably outrage many modern listeners, are not really that surprising given the album’s historical era and cultural background. Nevertheless, hearing Norman sling insults at pretty much every secular Rocker around at the time, including some comments that have nothing to do with religion and are just juvenile jabs, ends this otherwise wonderful album on something of a sour note.

The album’s title is not mentioned until its closing lines, which also include a reference to the lyrics to Jim Reeves’ Gospel classic “The World is Not My Home” (which may be more familiar to modern listeners from their quotation in the Tom Waits song “Come On Up to the House”), in the album’s third overt reference to the Rapture doctrine. This album definitely has an agenda, even if it’s not the same agenda usually associated with modern Evangelical Christianity, and if you’re one of those people who put ideology on a higher pedestal than art, you might well find that aspect off-putting. Granted, Phil Keaggy’s Christian Rock albums tend to be less confrontational, and they’re certainly better sung (Norman’s biggest liability is his strange, high-pitched vocal sound, which sometimes makes him sound like an Adam Sandler character), but Keaggy doesn’t have Norman’s sheer songwriting chops (and it’s not like Dylan was any great vocalist either). This album has fairly earned its special pride of place in the Christian Rock pantheon. if you’re an open-minded, sensible person who can appreciate the quality of great music and lyrics even if you don’t entirely agree with the message they’re trying to convey, this album is well worth your time.

“Poems, Prayers and Promises” by John Denver

John Denver gets made fun of a lot, and there’s valid reason to laugh at him…he never really grew out of the tree-hugging Hippie phase of his youth, and people like that are naturally going to be targets of ridicule by the time they’re in their thirties and forties (he was 53 years old when he died, after all). Still, he was one of the greatest Soft Rockers of the Seventies (a decade that had far more competition for that title than, say, the Eighties or Nineties), and his poetic eloquence and phenomenal gift for melody have to be respected.

Besides, you have to admire how he transformed the musical influences he started from into something artistically valid. His uncle had been a member of manufactured Pop-Folk sensations The New Christy Minstrels, and Denver took their artificial faux-Folk Music style and used it to make music so legitimate that real Folk artists like Peter, Paul and Mary actually wanted to cover his songs.

“Leavin’ on a Jet Plane” had already been a massive hit in Peter, Paul, and Mary’s cover version at this point, but this is the album that really made Denver a star, and it is without question his Magnum Opus. Of Denver’s other three massive hit albums from his peak period, Rocky Mountain High has some beautiful melodies, but is a bit excessively morose, given that its concept is essentially a brooding meditation on the destruction of the environment. His best-selling record, Back Home Again, has some lovely items like “Annie’s Song”, but also some excessively forced attempts to sound “down-home” like “Grandma’s Feather Bed” that are almost embarrassing. Finally, his highest-charting album, Windsong, is just as exquisite melodically as this record, but as its concept is an ode to natural beauty, it is by definition about inanimate things, things that cannot think and feel, and so it cannot compete with this record’s emotional impact.

The most famous song on the album is easily “Take Me Home, Country Road”. This song has always been Denver’s most universally beloved hit: even people who absolutely hate John Denver (and that demographic is larger than you’d expect) are generally willing to make an exception for this particular song. This seems a natural reaction, given the song’s exquisite melodic and poetic beauty, but it is surprising in one regard: among the co-authors credited on this song are two members of the Starland Vocal Band, perhaps the single most despised Soft Rock act in history (and one whose negative reputation is, to be frank, pretty much justified). That the people who can otherwise count the unspeakably vile “Afternoon Delight” as one of their better songwriting efforts could have contributed to this phenomenal Pop-Folk classic is hard to even remotely comprehend, but evidently true nonetheless.

That said, there are several other songs on the album that almost equal “Take Me Home, Country Road” for sheer beauty. Its overall Concept regards being contented and at peace with the cycles of time, as in the exquisitely meditative and profound title track, or the tenderly reassuring love song “Sweet Lady”.

Denver did include one moderately angry uptempo number, the Native American rights anthem “Wooden Indian”, presumably to keep the listener from nodding off from the album’s lullaby-esque overall sound. There’s even an attempt at Seventies ‘Jesus-Rock’ in the Larry Norman vein, “Gospel Changes”. That said, it’s more detached from actual religious conviction than Norman’s work…written less from the perspective of a devout Christian and more from that of an objective observer who sees merit in Jesus’ philosophy.

The material here isn’t exclusively composed by Denver himself: there are also three covers included, but they fit beautifully into the album’s concept. Indeed, Denver’s version of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” seems to fit in better with the overall theme on this record than it did on the Beatles album that bears its name. Denver also covers a much more obscure Paul McCartney composition, a quietly melancholy atmosphere piece called “Junk”, and it winds up being one of the most beautiful items on the album.

Denver’s cover of “Fire and Rain” by James Taylor, on the other hand, seems to have gained a controversial reputation, given that it takes a very different approach to the song than the original recording. But while Taylor’s original version is a very powerful Folk-Rock ballad, the quieter, more elegiac sorrow on Denver’s version is arguably even more heartbreaking, giving an impression of a lost and defeated resignation that is actually much sadder than Taylor’s still-defiant rendition.

Of course, even the best Denver albums always have a couple of corny moments, and this is no exception. The second hit from the album, the irritatingly naïve “Sunshine on My Shoulders”, is the kind of John Denver song his detractors always point toward in order to make fun of him, and while it fits in well enough with the overall concept, it is still easily the weakest item here.

“The Box”, the other easy-to-mock item here, is a spoken-word piece of very dated Hippie poetry regarding the nature of war. It’s not as painful as it sounds…it’s actually kind of charming in a way, somewhat resembling a much shorter version of Dr. Seuss’ The Butter Battle Book. But without the eloquence that his rhapsodic music always brought to his sentiments, Denver’s naïve Hippie worldview is ultimately revealed as the pretentious nonsense that it is—for all its charm and sincerity, there’s no denying that this poem is ultimately an appalling oversimplification of complex issues based on wishful thinking and the desire for easy answers that just don’t exist.

Even with these two lesser tracks, however, this is easily one of the greatest Soft Rock albums ever made, and one Denver never quite equaled as an overall cohesive album statement in all the remainder of his career. It certainly makes for one of the most moving and emotionally satisfying listening experiences I’ve personally ever encountered in any musical field, and to anyone who seeks it out after reading this review, if you don’t cry at least once while listening to this album, I will be extraordinarily surprised.

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“Heads & Tales” and “Sniper and Other Love Songs” by Harry Chapin

Harry Chapin’s first two albums, generally regarded as his best work by serious fans, are essentially companion pieces and were even released together as a two-disc set at one point. For this reason, I thought it only appropriate to cover both of them concurrently.

You know how Chapin has a reputation for being extremely sentimental and even sort of mawkish? Well, that reputation comes from his later albums (particularly Short Stories and Verities and Balderdash), not from these two. His first two records are absolutely brutal, alternating between slit-your-wrists sorrow and crazed, violent intensity. People today would probably not associate Chapin with songs about real-life mass murderers, self-mutilation or bestiality, but all of those topics are covered, in disturbingly graphic detail, on these two albums.

Chapin’s first album, Heads & Tales, is essentially nonstop misery, without a single moment of real happiness. It even manages to make the simple experience of travelling by bus (“Greyhound”) seem like a heartrending tragedy. The album mostly features Chapin fixated obsessively on what appears to be a single failed relationship, with song titles like “Empty”, “Sometime Somewhere Wife”, and “Same Sad Singer”. Even the pretty, wistful songs like “Could You Put Your Light On, Please?” and the quietly introspective “Any Old Kind of Day”, while they certainly show off Chapin’s gift for beautiful melodies, feature a depth of sorrow that his work after these albums never approached even at its darkest.

Heads & Tales also produced Chapin’s first actual hit, “Taxi”. A sadly ironic story ballad about a former couple with deferred dreams meeting by chance in a taxi cab, it managed to become a major and enduring hit despite its seven-minute length making it a bit unwieldy for the mainstream radio format. It’s also the only one of Chapin’s four actual Top Forty hits to get any real respect from professional critics and serious Rock and Folk fans, although there are other songs on these two albums that might have easily earned that level of prestige if anyone had actually heard of them.

The other big centerpiece on Heads & Tales is “Dogtown”, an incredibly disturbing song about the desperate widow of a whaler who dies at sea and her “relationship” with the dog that is her only companion. This isn’t played as a comedy song like Frank Zappa’s “Dirty Love”, either…it’s a harrowing Folk-Blues piece that echoes the sound of the storm-tossed seas and keeps rising to a scream at the end of each section. If you know anyone who dismisses Chapin as merely a purveyor of syrupy bathos, just play them this song and see how they react.

Chapin’s follow-up to that album, Sniper and Other Love Songs, is only marginally happier. Chapin by this point had found a relatively happy romantic relationship, and the opening track, “Sunday Morning Sunshine”, is a sweetly optimistic love song that seems miles away from the despair of his first album. However, after that song the album still consists almost entirely of tear-jerking and/or disturbing tracks, and another song from the album, “And the Baby Never Cries”, paints a much more bittersweet portrait of the aforementioned new relationship.

This album didn’t produce any actual Top Forty hits, but it did produce three songs that became very well-known among Chapin’s fans. The title-song, a ten-minute collage analyzing the motives of real-life mass shooter Charles Whitman, is one of Chapin’s most elaborate and complexly-written songs, going from narrative ballad to fictionalized press coverage to insane inner monologue. I don’t know if Stephen Sondheim or John Weidman are the type to listen to Harry Chapin, but I have to wonder if they had this song’s ideas in mind when they wrote the strikingly similar sentiments in the final scene of their musical Assassins.

“A Better Place to Be”, widely considered among serious Chapin fans to be perhaps the best song he ever wrote, displays a much subtler and more complex sense of irony than the more heavy-handed ironic elements found in other Chapin songs. It’s another narrative ballad, about eight minutes long in the studio version found here, which features a ‘little man’ telling a waitress at a bar a heartbreaking story of a beautiful, lonely woman whom he spent a single night with, only to have her disappear in the morning (“She left a six-word letter saying ‘It’s time that I moved on’”). The waitress is smitten with the man after hearing the story, and the man responds with the same words the woman said to him in his story: “If you want me to come with you/then that’s all right with me/cause I know I’m going nowhere/and anywhere’s a better place to be”. The genius of the song is that we’re left uncertain as to whether the story actually happened, or whether this was just the greatest, most manipulative pickup line in history.

The third song to gain a reputation among Chapin fans, to the point where it’s been dubbed “the Chapin anthem”, is “Circle”, which trades in the same kind of quiet, defeated wistfulness as “Any Old Time of Day” on Heads & Tales. In general, these albums seem to completely contradict the reputation Chapin has earned through songs like “Cat’s in the Cradle”, and they establish his genuine legitimacy as one of the truly great artists of the “Progressive Folk” field. If you’ve always found the excessive sentimentality of his later work something of a turn-off, hearing these first two records might completely change your mind about him.

“Joe’s Garage” by Frank Zappa

Concept Albums and Album Rock Operas, while present to some extent within virtually all subgenres of Rock music, were particularly popular among the Progressive Rock artists, to the point where it almost became a running joke. This is not exactly surprising, as the format proved an ideal vehicle for both Prog-Rock’s characteristic ambition and its practitioners’ fervent wish to be seen as serious artists. After the Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, Pink Floyd’s The Wall, Genesis’ The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway, Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s Tarkus, Rush’s 2112, and ELO’s Eldorado, just to name a few of the most celebrated examples, even Frank Zappa, the least pretentious and yet most genuinely Avant-Garde artist in the Prog-Rock genre, seems to have felt the need to jump on the bandwagon with his 1979 two-part album Joe’s Garage.

Zappa had already attempted a sort of miniature Rock Opera structure on two of his earlier albums, Absolutely Free and Apostrophe. The first of these, a seven-minute series of song fragments entitled “Brown Shoes Don’t Make It”, told the story of an unfulfilled middle-class worker drone who secretly fantasizes about having sex with a 13-year-old girl implied to be his own daughter, which should tell you something about the nature of Zappa’s sense of humor. The second was a completely incomprehensible suite of songs about an Eskimo named Nanook, where each song led into the next, but by the time it ended no-one had any idea how we had gotten from jokes about yellow snow to a religious pancake breakfast event (which is also a good indicator of what to expect on this album).

The honest truth is that most of Zappa’s ‘fans’ are either fans of his trademark filthy comedy songs or of his virtuosic Jazz-Rock noodling…surprisingly few are really enthusiastic about both, which is why most of his albums focus primarily on one or the other. Joe’s Garage is one of the few Zappa albums that makes heavy use of both, a somewhat risky move given his demographic’s divided loyalties.

I’m not sure Zappa’s heart was really into the ‘Concept’ part of this Concept Album: he seemed more interested in using the album’s “story” as an excuse to have fun and make pretty music than in actually creating a cohesive whole. The premise was something of a tired cliché by then within the Rock culture (a dystopian society that has outlawed Rock music), and the plot fell apart in the third ‘act’ in favor of extended instrumental sequences.

Also, the second of the piece’s three ‘acts’ has aged much less well than the other two, mostly because of some homophobic humor about prison rape that, while still funnier than most people would care to admit, does make for somewhat uncomfortable listening today. (That said, I don’t think his brutal mockery of Scientology on “A Token of My Extreme” is likely to make him too many enemies, so not all of the satire has dated.)

But for all the project’s flaws, the overall result is still one of the better Zappa albums…perhaps not on the level of We’re Only in It for the Money or Hot Rats or Over-Nite Sensation, but still on the upper tiers of his extensive catalogue. Some of the music was gorgeous, particularly “He Used to Cut the Grass” and “Watermelon in Easter Hay”, two extended solo guitar pieces which rank with the most beautiful melodies of Zappa’s career. Among the vocal songs, “Fembot in a Wet T-Shirt” and “Why Does It Hurt When I Pee?” are among Zappa’s funniest novelties. Both are much cleverer than they sound: the former is a contemptuous sendup of how stupid the very idea of a “wet t-shirt contest” really is (“Our big prize tonight is fifty American Dollars to the girl with the most exciting mammalian protruberances!”). Meanwhile, the latter features lyrics quirky enough to liven up its sophomoric subject matter into something genuinely creative (“my balls feel like a pair of maracas/oh, god, I probably got the gono-co-co-coccus”).

Other highlights include the relatively Pop-friendly title-song, a surprisingly sweet tribute to amateur garage bands, and a biting satire of the record industry called “Packard Goose” that makes no sense whatsoever in the context of the album’s story but is so much fun that almost no-one ever complains about it. The album is even a Jukebox Musical of sorts: many of the songs on the album (including the uncharacteristically touching ballad “Lucille Has Messed My Mind Up” and most of the songs in the second ‘act’) are drawn from material Zappa had written years ago but never put on an album before, and much of the guitar work was actually overdubbed excerpts from his live concerts.

The most bizarre thing about this album is the uncanny resemblance it bears to the album that would pretty much kill the Prog-Rock Concept Album trend, Kilroy Was Here by Styx. I’m sure you all know Styx…they’re the formulaic Arena Rock band that, prior to their disastrous attempt at Rock Opera, was really only notable for their lead singer’s intensely irritating voice. I would have assumed Zappa was trying to parody that album the way he parodied Disco culture with Sheik Yerbouti, except that Joe’s Garage actually came out a couple of years before Kilroy.

Both albums have almost exactly the same premise (a dystopian futuristic world that has outlawed Rock music). Both are centered around a deliberately generic everyman who functions as a stand-in for all of Rock culture. Both feature robotic-sounding narrator figures that turn out to be someone entirely different than they seem (Mr. Roboto turns out to be the titular hero Kilroy at the end of the first song, and the Central Scrutinizer turns out to be Frank Zappa himself at the end of the album). And of course, both get bored with their Concepts partway through and just start performing the kind of songs that the act in question was generally known for, with only the barest attempts to tie them into the supposed plot.

The difference between the two albums, apart from the obvious fact that Zappa was an infinitely better musician, is that Styx’s album is laughably earnest, with the band giving no impression that they have the slightest idea how silly they sound. Meanwhile, Zappa seems to be completely conscious of how ridiculous and trite his story is, and appears to be playing that fact for deliberate laughs. This is a story that requires a robust sense of irony to make it work, and that’s something that Styx just didn’t have, but that Zappa possessed in spades.

As I said, the album, despite its ambition, isn’t really the best work Zappa’s ever done, and the way it blends the two elements of his music that are usually kept largely separate may limit its appeal somewhat. Still, if you’re not easily offended and have a taste for both complex Jazz-Rock Fusion and crude comedy, this album is well worth picking up. In fact, I’d actually recommend it over several of the more famous Concept Albums to come out of the Prog-Rock genre, and I’d certainly recommend it over Kilroy Was Here in a heartbeat.

“Sammy Davis Jr NOW” by Sammy Davis Jr.

This album has somehow taken on the status of a legendary disaster in Sammy Davis, Jr.’s career, which may not be entirely a fair assessment based on its actual contents. It is admittedly the only one of his MGM album releases that is even still remembered today, but it nonetheless gets consistently treated like the red-headed stepchild of his discography.

Despite producing at least one song that has become an inescapable staple of Davis’ ‘best-of’ compilations, the album has never gotten a re-release of any kind in its original form, and consequently is only available for those willing to hunt down (and able to conveniently play) the original vinyl. As a result, most of our information about the album’s quality comes from then-contemporary reviews, which invariably paint it as a horrifically garish and tacky disaster. But I wondered if there was actually any truth to that assessment, so I did some research, listened to the actual contents of the album, and I present my findings here.

Of course, part of the problem is that the big hit from this album was “The Candy Man”. This song was widely despised when it came out, but for reasons that aren’t really relevant today. Remember, this was the era when Rock’n’Roll’s hatred and scorn for the genres that proceeded it was reaching its zenith, and the fact that such an obviously non-Rock song from a musical children’s movie was a Number One hit in that era filled most of the popular critics of the day with completely irrational rage. But now that multiple generations have grown up since that acknowledge the movie this song comes from as an immortal classic, I think we’ve outgrown the antipathy this song used to receive, and that most of us can acknowledge it for what it is—a gloriously sunny and delightful classic. (It’s also worth noting that the same songwriters who contributed this song, Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley, were responsible for plenty of Davis’ earlier signature hits from the Sixties, including “What Kind of Fool am I?” and “Who Can I Turn To (When Nobody Needs Me)?”).

There was one other Leslie Bricusse song included on the album…the triumphant, inspirational “I’ll Begin Again”. Written as part of Bricusse’s score for the movie Scrooge, which was a rather poor film but did feature fine songs, it sounds much like the songs Bricusse wrote with Newley in the Sixties, and provides a fine opportunity for Sammy to provide the same kind of warm, dramatic performance he had favored on his earlier hits by the songwriter.

Many of the complaints about this album have to do with the producer, Mike Curb. Davis himself didn’t care for Curb’s production, but, at least on this album, the results sound quite good, alternating between unashamedly lush Seventies Easy Listening and reasonably convincing attempts at Funk that still don’t go too far to sound credible when sung by Sammy.

I don’t really see the problem with Curb’s production, and the two songs he and Mack David wrote for this album are excellent. Particularly good is “I’m Over 25 (But You Can Trust Me)”, a wise and compassionate song about the idealism of youth seen from the perspective of an older person. “Take a Ride” may have originally been intended to be part of Donny Osmond’s risible attempt to reinvent himself as a Pop-Soul singer, but it sounds perfectly respectable in Sammy’s rendition,and is actually a lot of fun as a composition.

Particularly lovely is “Willoughby Grove”, a touching narrative from the perspective of a man who spent his childhood in the titular poor country neighborhood. He reminisces about the beauty and innocence of that time, then tells of how,because he wanted to “see the world”, he “hitched a ride” and “never found a reason to return”. The song turns heartbreaking as he finally comes home for his mother’s funeral and sees the neighborhood has been modernized and gentrified and the innocence he prized destroyed (“and in our yard, there’s a factory”). Davis gives this sad narrative especial weight with his solemn, deeply felt reading, and the track is one of the album’s utmost highlights.

“This Is My Life” bears a certain resemblance to a less grandiose, more vulnerable version of “My Way”. Like that song, it is a translation of a foreign hit with the lyrics translated into English, but here those lyrics are significantly superior to those in “My Way”, and it serves as an effective counterpart to that song, expressing the essence of Sammy’s persona just as eloquently as the former song did Sinatra’s.

“Take My Hand” may be a pretty standard, predictable Gospel pastiche, but Davis sells the Hell out of it, and the result is actually quite stirring. And a funk-blues arrangement of the Great American Songbook standard “I Want To Be Happy” serves as a perfect emblem of this album’s attempt to modernize Davis’ sound without contradicting his rich musical legacy.

Even the famously cheesy Easy Listening standard “MacArthur Park” comes off surprisingly well here. There’s only so much you can do about the embarrassing lyrics on the song’s chorus, but Davis’ performance is beyond reproach, taking the song seriously throughout and offering a particularly eloquent delivery of the song’s haunting middle section (which is easily the best part of the song in any case).

The only track on this album where it seems to remotely merit its bad reputation is the final one, where Davis offers an incredibly ill-advised and awkward rendition of the “Theme from Shaft”. Isaac Hayes himself helped with the arrangement and even contributed some new lyrics to this version, but the result is still every bit as embarrassing as it sounds. Indeed, this song seems to embody the reputation that the whole album has acquired, which seems a bit unfair given that it’s really only based on one track at the tail end of the album.

Overall, this album comes across today as one of Davis’ classics, and if they would actually give it a CD and/or digital release so modern audiences could hear it, I would bet good money that its reputation would be vindicated in no time.

“A Night at the Opera” by Queen

With the musical bio-film Bohemian Rhapsody having become a box office smash (despite the generally lukewarm response it has garnered with critics), I felt I had to cover something relevant to this recent hit musical film. But the truth is that there’s surprisingly little of interest to say about the film itself, apart from pointing out its myriad historical inaccuracies (which literally everyone else has already done). So instead, I thought I’d discuss a far richer and more interesting subject…the album that is given the most attention in the film, and indeed is generally regarded as Queen’s Magnum Opus (a few would opt for their heartwrenching swan song Innuendo, but this still remains by far the more common choice for that title). So I give you the album that made Queen the legends they are now…A Night at the Opera.

To start with, don’t let anyone tell you that Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited, or the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, or Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon is the most surreal and incomprehensible Classic Rock album of all time. This album holds that title, hands down. People often joke that the aforementioned albums must have been made on drugs, but I refuse to believe any drugs exist that are powerful enough to produce an album like this. You simply can’t come up with something this insane by accident; you have to be trying.

There is a widespread claim that this record is, in fact, a full-fledged Concept Album. It’s certainly structured like one, with several songs flowing directly into one another, but because no-one has the slightest idea what any of the lyrics mean, this claim has proven to be impossible to definitely confirm or deny. The music, with its heavy influences from Opera and Musical Theater, is richer and more ambitious than any Rock’n’Roll ever heard up to that point (yes, even that of the Beatles), while the lyrics are a mix of maddeningly opaque cryptograms and outright gibberish, the dividing line between which has never been clear. Some of the lyrics do appear to have a concrete meaning (for example, people have more or less figured out that the melancholy “39” tells a story about an astronaut returning from a hundred-year space flight under its layers of confusion), but it’s impossible to know if some of the more indecipherable songs actually mean anything or not.

For example, I have listened to the opening track, “Death on Two Legs”, over a dozen times for this review alone, and I still don’t have the slightest clue what it’s supposed to be about. Then there’s lyrics like “You call me sweet like I’m some kind of cheese” (from the bizarre Rocker “Sweet Lady”), or the utterly insane “I’m In Love With My Car”, which, from the lyrics and presentation, does not seem to be a metaphor…it appears to literally describe a man with an erotic attachment to an automobile.

On top of this, in between the intense Rock music that forms the bulk of the album are inserted three surreal, twee pastiche interludes apparently based on British Music Hall influences…”Lazing on a Sunday Afternoon”, “Seaside Rendezvous”, and “Good Company”. Then, apparently just to confuse the audience, we get two fairly straightforward romantic ballads, “You’re My Best Friend” and “Love of My Life”. These songs feature the same intense quasi-Operatic sound as the rest of the album, but in every other respect, they are perfectly normal love songs, and their presence just makes the album seem all the more insane.

Of course, the climax and centerpiece of the album is the immortal “Bohemian Rhapsody”. I’m sure every person reading this already knows the song, but I still want to point out how it goes from sorrow to silliness in an instant during the middle section. It starts as a keening aria that seems to be telling the story of an impoverished young man who kills another man and is condemned to die for it, and then out of nowhere there’s “Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you do the fandango?” In other words, it goes quite abruptly from parodying tragic Opera to parodying Comic Opera, a transformation that, interestingly enough, does not generally happen in Opera, at least not with this degree of sudden contrast.

However, contrary to popular belief, “Bohemian Rhapsody” is not actually the longest track on the album. That would be “The Prophet’s Song”. at eight minutes (to “Bohemian Rhapsody”‘s six). The song, a throwback to the fantasy themes found on the band’s first two albums, contains a gloriously self-indulgent three-minute section where the singers repeat two short phrases ad infinitum in ridiculously elaborate and showy vocal harmonies.

This album is outrageously self-indulgent, brain-breakingly incomprehensible, generally insane, and one of the greatest albums in Rock history. It honestly feels like a Lewis Carroll poem set to monumental music and stretched out to album length. This is what it would have sounded like if late-career Train really had been absurdist geniuses gleefully trolling the entire world (and had made infinitely better music, obviously). Queen would go on to make a number of great albums in the future, including a supposed ‘sequel’ to this album in A Day at the Races, but never would they feel quite as utterly in their element as they do here, and they never topped this one as a pure showcase for them doing what they do best.

“17” by XXXTentacion

I usually avoid this practice, but just this once, let me start this review by sharing a personal anecdote. I made a seemingly innocuous comment about this artist on Twitter during the American Music Awards, calling him a “decent enough second-tier Hook Rapper”. This led to one of my former acquaintances on that platform verbally abusing me behind my back because the artist in question had been accused of domestic abuse (let’s note, just for context, that this artist was also dead by this time). Ironically enough, it was this personal attack that led me to explore the artist’s work beyond the few singles I had then been exposed to, and I have actually come to the conclusion that I was entirely too dismissive of this late Rap/R&B star’s work. My prior description of him actually did him a disservice, and my claim at the time that he would never have beaten SZA and Khalid for the Favorite R&B Album award if he had not died now seems to me to be questionable, at best.

It is certainly clear just from this album alone that XXXTentacion was a deeply disturbed individual (which might go some way towards explaining the things he was accused of during his life), but as someone who has experience with battling this kind of severe of mental illness, I’m not inclined to judge him (there but for the grace of successful medication go I, and all that). Besides, he’s hardly the first musician to be accused of this particular crime. Both John Lennon and Bing Crosby were guilty of exactly the same crimes, and I don’t see many people trying to deny their legacies because of it.

And while he might not be a giant on the level of the Beatles or Crosby, this album makes it clear that we lost an enormous and important talent when this man was killed. Unlike his long, sprawling follow-up release ?, this album is an intensely focused gut-punch of psychological truth (hence its surprisingly short length of only 22 minutes). It begins with a spoken introduction warning off those that would judge him, which raises the question of how (or why) those who condemn him have even heard his music when he tells them exactly why they shouldn’t listen before the album even begins. As someone more inclined to sympathize with his experiences, I of course forged ahead, and was absolutely stunned by what followed.

I normally single out individual songs in these reviews, but I’m not sure this album really has any. Granted, they did release a few fragments of this album as “singles”, but this goes beyond even the unified album statements we’ve been getting more and more of in the past few years. This is more like a Classical-style suite or Tone Poem…a freeform composition broken up into movements, but still intended to be heard in one continuous take. The result is an incredibly haunting dreamscape that really does feel like a journey into a deeply disturbed and tragic psyche. There are brief fragments of elegaic, almost Classical beauty, moans of anguish that feel like a postmodern version of the Blues, and occasional bursts of rapid-fire rapping that feel like stabs of dissonant anger among the overall ambiance. All this over an endlessly shifting instrumental background that sounds like it can never find any rest. The lyrics are mostly broken, repeated phrases full of desperately depressing imagery that perfectly fit with the dream-logic mentality behind the album, and the singer generally delivers them in a barely-intelligible murmur that is nonetheless far more full of raw emotion that the attempts at the same sound by the likes of Future or Post Malone.

Only one featured guest Rapper appears anywhere on the album. It might have been better to feature none at all, given how insanely personal the material here is, but Trippie Redd, a dear friend of the artist who had started out as an enemy, seems attuned enough to his friend’s mentality that you can hardly tell there are two rappers on that track at all. This is one of the finest albums of 2017, no small statement given what a bumper year for great Pop album that was, and it explains why this tragic, tortured young visionary made such a deeply-felt impact during his brief time in the spotlight. In retrospect, the only thing I regret about that Twitter comment is not giving this shining talent more credit than I did, and I certainly won’t make that mistake again.

“Heart of Stone” by Cher

1989 (the year, not the Taylor Swift album) was not, on the whole, a particularly good year for Pop music (indeed, it is generally considered one of the worst years on record), but even a year like that is bound to have a couple of bright spots, and the release of this album was one of the brightest of all. This album is Cher’s second-best-selling of all time (right after her Nineties “comeback” album, Believe), and is generally regarded as her Magnum Opus by her fans. Moreover, it set the sonic template for all of Nineties Adult Contemporary–without this album, for example, Celine Dion’s entire body of work would probably not have existed, at least in the form it wound up taking.

The ‘new sound’ this album pioneers was not really unheard-of at the time: this album simply placed it in a new context. The style was familiar from the Rock ballads sung by the ‘Hair Metal’ bands of the Eighties, but generally these songs were limited to a couple of tracks on albums otherwise composed of standard Hard Rock. What this album did was place an entire album’s worth of Hair Metal ballads on a single, exclusively ballad-focused disc. And it’s worth noting that the kind of albums that had previously focused entirely on Soft Rock ballads had featured a very different, much softer sound that, to be brutally frank, has not aged especially well (think Air Supply or Eighties-era Chicago, for example).

Apart from Cher herself, there were two other artists who were crucial to this album’s innovations. Diane Warren was the premiere author of Easy Listening songs from the late Eighties through the Nineties, and while her assembly-line approach to songwriting meant that she had more than her share of off days, she was always known for doing particularly good work in her collaborations with Cher, from this album to “You Haven’t Seen the Last of Me” from the movie Burlesque as late as 2010.

Also a prominent contributor to this album’s sound was Desmond Child, the Pop-Rock songwriter and producer best known for being one of the major forces behind Bon Jovi’s output and for being an equally major impetus in Aerosmith’s late-Eighties comeback. Child wrote and produced a significant portion of this album’s material, and his fingerprints are all over it, doing much to explain its prominent Hair Metal influences.

This album produced two of Cher’s all-time classic singles…the anguished “If I Could Turn Back Time” is probably the best-known, but “Just Like Jesse James”, a vaguely Country-influenced ballad presenting romance as a power struggle, is just as compelling. The stoically sorrowful title track was also a minor hit. The album also features two covers of other artists’ songs, though both were still the work of Warren and/or Child. “Love on a Rooftop”, was a single for former Sixties girl-group star Ronnie Spector, while “You Wouldn’t Know Love” was originally one of the better tracks on Michael Bolton’s Soul Provider album earlier in the same year. Of the pure album cuts, perhaps the most memorable is the devastating “Does Anybody Really Fall in Love Anymore?”, which featured a co-writing assist by Jon Bon Jovi himself.

Pretty much the only track that doesn’t feel like it belongs is “After All”, a duet with former Chicago lead singer Peter Cetera. This isn’t too terribly surprising, as it was not actually written for the album…it was an interpolation of the theme song Cher and Cetera recorded for the movie Chances Are. The lyrics, by Fame lyricist Dean Pitchford, are a cut above the usual level of Eighties Soft Rock, but, apart from the obvious fact that Peter Cetera is a lousy singer, the song just doesn’t fit in with the album’s sound. It sounds like something that Cetera would have recorded with Chicago, and represents the old Soft Rock sound of the Eighties that Cher was overtaking rather than the new sound this album was introducing.

Overall, even in a career as long and illustrious as Cher’s, I can definitely see why this is generally regarded as her best album, and it ranks alongside Genesis’ Invisible Touch, Sting’s …Nothing Like the Sun, Bryan Adams’ Reckless, and Billy Joel’s An Innocent Man as one of the finest Soft Rock albums of its decade…not a field with a great deal of competition, true, given the quality of most of that genre in the Eighties, but still a reminder that even in their darkest hours, Easy Listening and Soft Rock can still be legitimate sources of truly great music.