My Own Private Record Club*

I’d say 36 Chambers is probably my favourite rap album of all time and sometimes my favourite album of all time*. I literally never get bored of it and the fact much of it sounds like it was recorded on a dictaphone makes its musical and lyrical prowess all the more astonishing.

#2: I think my brother and I could recount the ‘torture, motherfucker…’ skit word for word…worryingly enough. In our defense, this was the era of Tarantino, rather than Hostel so there was a more tongue-in-cheek attitude to violence.

#3: That’s absolutely brilliant. I am absolutely rubbish at telling vocalists apart even when it’s really obvious. Obviously even I can tell when it’s ODB on the mic…

*I can say this since this is about ROCKISM!

Yeah, that’s easily the best skit. ‘cookin’ up some marvelous shit to get yo mouf waterin”, ‘he on some now you see me, now you don’t shit’, ‘he a physcopathic thinker’ and ‘always on point’ have entered my friends’ and my lexicon of phrases probably forever.

RZA and GZA are Clan bosses, right? With GZA leaning a bit more to the production side? So RZA probably got a free pass on whatever verses he wanted. I heard a story that GZA made the others battle each other to earn their cuts, ensuring a suitably tense, confrontational atmosphere in the studio.

Re6: It’s the Rza who’s the producer – and on ETWT:36C he’s pretty much the sole producer. He was definitely the boss at that point. What’s interesting on the album credits is how in progress some of the branding stuff is – it says ‘Wu-Tang Clan is: Prince Rakeem “The Rza”, The Method Man, U-God, Rebel Ins, Shallah Raekwon, Ghost Face Killer, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, & The Genius “The Gza” ‘.

(Prince Rakeem was the name Rza had used during his unsuccessful, very different pre-Wu solo career.)

Re9: Yeah, that would make sense.

Re11: The general rule of thumb seems to be that the debuts are the strongest of the solo albums, with the exceptions being Ghostface Killah’s Fishscale, from 2006, which is my favourite album of the 21st century so far, and apparently Cuban Linx II, which I’ve never heard but got reviews saying it’s every bit the equal of the original.

Surprised you hadn’t listened to the Sky Ferreira record before, it was one of my favourites of 2013. And very judicious cropping of nipples!

@16, Weej. Sky F’s album has been one of my recent faves too although it didn’t appear on my radar until early 2014. In fact, ‘I Will’ was my #1 track last year, and I was briefly obsessed with the vids for the title tack and for ‘You’re Not The One’. She did the latter well on Letterman too, looking every inch the rock-star. I thought she’d break-through more than she has. But I also thought, wrongly, that Charli XCX’s ‘Break The Rules’ was going to be a monster and that War on Drugs were going to be big stars so maybe there just isn’t much interest in or pent up demand among tweens and teens for something even slightly more rock-ish (unless you’re Kanye).

When we speak of Sketches as a token jazz album in the collection, I think it’s important to note that it acquired that reputation in the early rock era, before the Beatles made rock’n’roll art, when sophisto-pop ruled the day and groups with guitars were widely considered to be on the way out.

And in that context, it makes sense—its arrangements (and Gil Evans, I would argue, is the real star of the album, moreso than Miles) bridge the gap between “serious” orchestral music and the heavily-orchestrated pop of the ’50s and early ’60s, e.g. Patsy Cline with an 80-piece string section, or Sinatra’s big bands.

In that context, Miles (and by extension cool jazz in general) was approachable. The tempos were relaxed; the solos weren’t too aggressive or “out.” And the conceptual hook makes it hang together as an album, which was still something of a novelty in 1960.

@25 Are there no jazz albums that are representative of the genre but lack its off-putting qualities?

(Rhetorical question, really. I would say 60s Miles Davis, among others, fits that bill.)