Day 0895 - I See a Darkness" (1999)

Bonnie Prince Billy "I See a Darkness" (1999)

Will Oldham had been making music for a while under different aliases.  As well as his own name, he’d recorded with groups named Palace Brothers and Palace Music.  Oldham explained the reason for these changing names was that he was making different music with each ensemble/project so wanted to signpost this with the name changes.

This is the first album released under the Bonnie “Prince” Billy nom de plume, and he seems to have stuck with it since then.

The sound here is a kind of delicate, gloomy folk.   It's really subdued, stripped down, acoustic and brilliant with occasional rocking outbursts.  "Nomadic Revery" kind of reminds me of Nirvana unplugged covering the Meat Puppets.  Tracks elsewhere could be favourably compared to Nick Cave's "The Boatman's Call" album.

The album was well received critically and other artists looked to cover the songs, most notably Johnny Cash covering the title track on one of his "American Recordings" albums.

Day 0864 - Apocalypse Dudes

Turbonegro "Apocalypse Dudes" (1998)

Turbonegro had started off with noise-rock, moved through their own 'death-punk' sound and here adopt a style that is straight out of the 70s rock, punk and glam play-books.   By all accounts their line-up was as changeable as their choice of genre.

"Selfdestructo Bust" sounds like a slightly updated take on the Stooges.  "Prince of the Rodeo" throws in some congas to glam up the mix, and album closer "Good Head" leads out with enough excessive guitar soloing to make Slash blush.

The song titles nod to the Norwegian group's tongue-in-cheek approach too, with pearlers like "Rock Against Ass", "Don't Say Motherfucker, Motherfucker" and "Rendezvous with Anus".

I probably won't rush to revisit it, but it was fun enough.

Day 0663 - Straight Outta Compton

N.W.A. "Straight Outta Compton" (1989)

We wrap up the 1980s with another classic rap release.   Oddly, this album was funded via a canny marketing move from Priority Records, who licensed and released an album by the fictional group 'The California Raisins' who had hit it big with their cover of 'Heard it on the Grapevine'.



Eazy E assembled the group of DJs and MCs, and put together an undeniable slice of gangster rap.   Whereas Public Enemy brought their 'wall of noise' and De La Soul, their pop-leaning sample-based tracks, N.W.A. just lay down sparse rhythms with some scratches and a few well-placed sounds and beats-by-Dre (and Yella) to create the backing for Eazy-E, Ice Cube and Mc Ren to rhyme over. 

The tracks are famously aggressive, packed with violence, which the group were accused of glorifying, but as they pointed out, they were just reporting on what life was actually like in their neighbourhood.  The opening salvo of "Straight outta Compton" "Fuck Tha Police" and "Gangsta Gangsta" set the scene, but the album holds its own throughout the duration.

The mix of the three MCs works really well and adds variety enough to keep things spicey across the album's runtime.  

Day 0660 - 3 Feet High and Rising

De La Soul "3 Feet High and Rising" (1989)

 
For a time De La Soul were labelled as rap's hippies.  This album is a startlingly more colourful, sunshiney and less aggressive release than those from other prominent hiphop artists at the time such as Public Enemy and NWA.

One critic called them the new-wave to Public Enemy's punk, and I guess it's as good a comparison as any.   A sample-heavy record, the group had borrowed from artists as diverse as Johnny Cash, Hall & Oates, and the Turtles.   The latter of these would lead to the former members of the Turtles suing the band for samples of their music featured in the track "Transmitting from Mars".  That lawsuit took a lot of air out of the sampling movement, with artists coming to fear the exorbitant legal costs that could result.

I don't usually take much interest in lyrics, but as one of the songs features the name of my wife I decided to read the lyrics.  This is some top shelf wordplay: interesting, narrative and creative usage.

Day 0640 - Like a Prayer

Madonna "Like a Prayer" (1989)

Madonna moved away from her dancey pop music into a more artistically daring form of pop, one that led critics to label it "as close to art as pop gets"

An album born from turmoil, Madonna was dealing with the Catholic guilt bred into her through her upbringing, coming close to the age her mother had been when she died, and having her tumultuous marriage to Sean Penn come to an end.

Madonna funnelled all of this into her work, with an album steeped in sex and God.  As such, it wasn't exactly welcomed by the church.  The Vatican condemned one of her music videos and Pepsi pulled out of promotional deal with her (apparently controversial religious overtones are not welcome, but shallow Kardashian trivialisation of important social movements is fine). 

She had been working to develop a musical with Prince, that didn't end up eventuating, but the collaboration did result in him dueting with her on the song "Love Song" and contributed some guitar and production elsewhere on the album.

The album cemented Madonna's place as pop royalty and seemed to be her working out some residual catholic guilt, opening her up to more confronting projects such as her album "Erotica" and her book "Sex".

Day 0591 - Sign o' the Times

Prince "Sign o' the Times " (1987)

 
Prince had been working on a double album with the Revolution "Dream Factory", and a solo album that he'd planned to release under the feminine pseudonym 'Camille'.  He ended up disbanding the Revolution and scrapping the Camille album.  Combining the material from these projects with some new songs he planned a triple album "Crystal Ball".   This was vetoed by the record company who baulked at releasing that much material simultaneously, and Prince was left to cherry-pick tracks for a single album.

You'd think that choosing from such a large pool of songs this would be a 'home run' of an album.  Instead, I feel as though the songs being drawn from 3 disparate projects over a number of years led to a bit of a lack of cohesion across the material.

There are plenty of good moments here, and Prince explores every genre that he'd investigated up till that point (and then some), but as a whole it just doesn't quite hit the spot for me the way that '1999' or 'Purple Rain' did.

Day 0538 - Purple Rain

Prince & the Revolution "Purple Rain" (1984) - got it

Prince set aside his sleazy synth-funk to put forward his pop opus, "Purple Rain".  This soundtrack to Prince's semi-autbiographical film of the same name would go on to become the third highest selling soundtrack (such as it was) of all time.

Prince lays down some catchy tunes with his usual ear for skilled and effective musical arrangements, overlaid with his wild, desperate vocals.  This was Prince's shot at the bigtime so he even set about cleaning up his sex-heavy lyrics... mostly.  He couldn't help himself, so the beautiful, melodic "Darling Nikki" features reference to masturbating with a magazine and (apparently) helped kickstart the "Parental Advisory" stickers that Al Gore's wife and her 'good taste' crusaders spearheaded.

Interestingly, the title track was originally aimed to be a country song, and a duet with Stevie Nicks.  She said that Prince sent her a 10 minute instrumental demo with a request for her to write lyrics, but she balked at the task.  It was eventually reworked as the epic psychedelic gospel pop rock track that it is.

Day 0497 - 1999

Prince "1999" (1982)

Though Prince's next album "Purple Rain" would contribute to the parental advisory stickers being added to albums, this one is also pretty full-on (in typical Prince fashion).  It includes the ad-libbed line "I sincerely want to fuck the taste out of your mouth".

Barry White, Isaac Hayes and Marvin Gaye may have been masters of the bedroom groove that gave you the aural equivalent of being laid down on satin sheets, but I daresay Prince was king of the 'fuck-groove'.  The pull your panties down in the backseat and get buck-wild vibe.  "Lady Cab Driver" and "International lover" are pretty overt with this with Prince's ecstatic squeals and hard funk grooves, but the whole album has touches of the erotic.

Combining the warm grooves of Funkadelic with the machine-like rhythms of Kraftwerk, Prince was the future.