Listening to Four Albums From Four Decades In One Weekend
I’m sick. I’m stuck at home. I’m listening to some of the most beloved albums ever made.
Miles Davis, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and Michael Jackson.
All first time listens. All impressions written immediately after each listen.
The 1950s
Miles Davis – Birth of the Cool
The bleat of horns and twinkle of keys undergirded by slithering snare. A constantly morphing, breathing, living thing, this album. Jazz in its most primally pleasurable form, quick little 2-to-3-minute ditties that each, somehow, make room for both full band melodies and attention-grabbing solos. It’s funny that this was technically a compilation of previously released tunes, because there’s a chemistry to these songs, the way they weave and dance between one another’s constantly-shifting structures, that feels like they were meant to be together like this. It’s the kind of shit that makes you want to fall in love, get stoned, and move your body like a Chuck Jones character all at once. Listening to this sitting alone in my room, morning sun barely peeking through my mostly-shut curtains, I felt like I was at the edge of a cool blue light in a darkened club, watching a silhouetted man dance his fingers on a horn’s keys faster than my brain could process. If I didn’t know better I’d say I caught a contact high off a stranger’s second-hand smoke.
Favorite songs: “Moon Dreams” / “Rocker” / “Rouge”
The 1960s
The Beatles – Abbey Road
I have a music snob friend I used to drive crazy by saying, whenever The Beatles came up, that I “respect them”, the implication being I didn’t really enjoy their music but couldn’t deny their influence. The Beatles were evergreen, he insisted, with songs and hooks that transcended their era. Listening to Abbey Road for the first time, I think I finally get what he meant: though they sometimes begin with terminally-1960s melodies, the songs on Abbey Road rarely stay that way. These are restless tracks, constantly shifting and experimenting and introducing unexpected little touches, their serpentine quality belied by their sunny exteriors. There’s the little guitar frills in “Come Together”, always threatening to become a solo but never quite getting there. There’s Paul’s sudden shift to a scream on “Oh! Darling”, one of the album’s gentlest tracks exploding into one of its most propulsive. There’s the 1-2 punch of “Octopus’s Garden” and “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”, the former constantly flirting with becoming a much heavier song than it’s children’s tale conceit, the latter often breaking out of it’s Sabbath-esque lead riff to briefly let the light in. And of course there’s that whole final stretch of eight 1-2 minute tracks that bleed seamlessly from one to the next. I’m tempted to call them experimental sketches, but they’re more like a single cohesive suite of character studies and stories, the absurdity of the world and the people in it as The Beatles saw them, summarized in one furious run of music. Nearly every song on Abbey Road expands and contrasts with a musical energy not unlike jazz, while also featuring hooks so earworm-y they’ve sat at the peak of the monocultural mountain for literal decades. The Beatles: pretty good! Who knew.
Favorite Songs: “Come Together” / “Oh! Darling” / “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)”
The 1970s
Pink Floyd – Dark Side of the Moon
My biggest question going into this one was whether or not Dark Side of the Moon truly earned its cultural shorthand as THE album for loser pothead older brothers, and if anything it was even spacer than I expected, with a frequent use of atmospheric noise, experimental riffs, and natural sounds that feel ahead of its time. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff, those kinds of noises made to lose your sense of self in, and their excess here does legitimately make this thing feel cosmic. Combine that with the extremely, shall we say, wide view of the world Dark Side of the Moon takes, as if it were an attempt to explain the entire universe in 42 minutes, and it’s easy to see this album as not just a psychedelic rock mainstay but an attempt to write an entire philosophical treatise on modern society in ferocious guitar solos, drum fills, and classic rock wails. On the lyrical front it’s, uh, fine. Lines like this one from “Us and Them”, on the hypocrisy of the powers that be: “Up and down / And in the end / It's only round and round” have a real surface-level deepness that mostly made me semi-ironically think “yeah, man, whatever you say.” Then 30 seconds later a saxophone solo comes in, and that shaky profundity is forgotten. There is something profound here, at the cross-section of spaced-out ambience and un-self-consciously huge arena rock, a pocket universe you could get lost in. At moments it pulled me there, and lost in it I was. If I’d been stoned on 1990s ditch weed it might have even blown my mind.
Favorite Songs: “Time” / “Us and Them” / “Any Colour You Like”
The 1980s
Michael Jackson – Thriller
Good pop is spontaneous emotion wrapped in hooks and harmonies. Meeting eyes with the beautiful stranger across the bar, sharing a drink, a dance, a single night together; a brief moment of animalistic catharsis in a life often defined by toil and hardship. Condense that into 4 minutes of snares and synths and you’ve got a great pop song. Thriller hits those highs, sometimes. “Baby You’re Mine” made me yearn for a romance I wasn’t having; “Billie Jean” turns paranoia into a neon fireworks display of shrieked high notes. I have to admit, though, that I failed to completely compartmentalize here: Jackson was obviously an inveterate performer, but a lot of what he sings about here, all the various ladies he claims to be courting or have courted, rang as somewhat false to me, someone singing all the right notes about a life they didn’t actually have, like a bitterly single wedding singer belting it about the joys of love. Is that actually there in his performance, the work of an obvious professional, or am I just bringing my knowledge of his personal life into it? Hard to say, but it is probably why “Billie Jean” was the high point to me; though it might be a fantasy, the resentment simmering beneath that narrative feels all too real, a man bristling as he’s told he’s something he knows he isn’t, a whole song about rejecting the world’s expectations for you but not quite being about to escape them. I’m sure Jackson related. Thriller as a whole, though: while the craft is obviously second-to-none, it failed to make me feel much beyond that. Let’s just say it’s not for me and move on.
Favorite Songs: “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’” / “Baby You’re Mine” / “Billie Jean”
Join me next weekend, when I cap this little adventure off with the 90s, 00s, 10s, and 20s.
