Week 49

Red Hot Chili Peppers  – Freaky Styley

Right. I didn’t love the first RHCP I listened to this year. I certainly don’t remember it very well here at the year’s end. But while I was researching that album, I saw that RHCP had an album produced by George Clinton.

George Clinton is my favorite Clinton.

My mental referent for the RHCP is much of the album ‘Californication’ and the song ‘Under the Bridge’. It is thus hard for me to really conceptualize why RHCP is (or was) considered a funk band. I just don’t get it.

Well, this album will explain it to you.

I don’t have a lot to say about this album. It was good enough. It got me through a week of grading papers, so in that respect I am pretty grateful. I am rather shocked at how much this band has changed, and how starkly you can hear the change in the band over the years.

Week 50

Michael Jackson – Bad

Here in December, I can’t actually recall which Michael Jackson album I listened to back in Jan. I am reasonably sure it was ‘Thriller’, but was it though?

I am also reasonably sure my life was rendered better from the listening of it.

Well, idem for ‘Bad’. At this point, I guess I have a pretty good idea what the king of pop is about. I don’t think I need to dive any deeper here.

Week 51

Weird Al Yankovic – Running with Scissors

When I was planning this project, I would often just do a google search for ‘best [artist name] album’ and roll the dice that way. It felt like a democratizing process, as it will hopefully give me whatever album the internet has averaged out as the best. Sure, ‘best’ is arbitrary as it is, but what I am after is ‘most enjoyed’ and it likely amounts to the same thing here.

I came across a lot of pointless internet listicles in the process, and I tried to ignore those for more well though out blog posts. But here at the end of the year, when I was doing this again for a bunch of artists, I went with a different avenue. In the case of weird Al, I went with reddit. I found a post where someone claimed that ‘Running with Scissors’ was the hands down most upvoted.

Democracy at work.

It’s kind of weird that Yankovic’s thing can be done over and over again, year after year, and never really get old. His talent for parody is truly something else. This album had more than a few songs that put a smile on my face. More so than the one I listened to previously.

Week 52

Mozart – Le Nozze di Figaro

Well, this is left turn.

I planned this out way back in the beginning of the year. Part of it was just the raging patriotism in me, and part of it was the foreknowledge that I would be at my mom’s house for Christmas. Opera is pretty much a given there, and so I figured I would roll the dice and see what Opera came up. Le Nozze di Figaro is pretty much a classic as far as opera, and so its likelihood of coming up was pretty high.

I could argue that I have been listening to opera my whole life. I just wasn’t paying much attention to it. I think that is a pretty fair assessment. This time around, it wasn’t so much a matter of listening to it as it was forming a worthy opinion of it. One thing I noticed immediately, now that I was listening for it, was that Opera really works on a lot of levels. It makes for pretty good background music if you need to ignore something while working on a project. But if you do start to listen, its pretty damn enjoyable.

Whelp, I am going to put the album project on hold for a bit. Can you tell I am a bit burned out on it? I sure can. One album a week is a bit much.