How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

in Life, Music | August 3rd, 2017

When Leonard Cohen released You Want it Darker in late 2016, some suspected that it would be his last album. When the 82-year-old singer-songwriter died nineteen days later, it felt like a reprise of David Bowie’s passage from this mortal coil at the beginning of that year in which we lost so many important musicians: just two days after the release of his album Blackstar, Bowie shocked the world by dying of an illness he’d chosen not to make public. Both Cohen and Bowie’s fans immediately doubled down their scrutiny of what turned out to be their final works, finding in both of them artistic interpretations of the confrontation with death.

The title track of You Want It Darker, says the narrator of the Polyphonic video essay above, “is not just any song, but the culmination of many meditations on Cohen’s own mortality. The result is a hauntingly accusatory song towards his own god.”

This analysis focuses on lines, delivered by Cohen’s gravelier-than-ever singing voice, like “If you are the dealer, I’m out of the game / If you are the healer, that means I’m broken and lame” and “If thine is the glory, then mine must be the shame / You want it darker, we kill the flame.” Cohen also uses phrases taken from a Jewish mourner’s prayer as a way of “facing up to his god and submitting.”

The non-religious Bowie took a different tack. “Just take a look at Bowie’s costume,” says the essay’s narrator. “He’s bandaged, frail, and maniacal in the ‘Blackstar’ video. While the bandage serves to represent wounds, it can also be taken as a blindfold,” historically “worn by those condemned to execution.” Using Christian imagery, Bowie frames his song “in the post-paradise world of mortal life,” in a sense referencing what Cohen once described as “our blood myth,” the crucifixion. And so Bowie’s song “is using our cultural vocabulary to explore our relationship with death.” And yet, “in the midst of this dark song, Bowie offers optimism” in the form of the titular Blackstar, a “newly inspired being” that emerges from death.

“While mankind can’t cheat death, we can still find immortality in the way people remember us, the legacy that they carry on.” And despite recognizing their basic humanity, many of us carriers of the legacy still struggle to process the deaths of high-profile, sui generis performing artists. Maybe it has to do with their status as icons, and icons, strictly speaking, can’t die — but nor can they live. Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the men, may have finished their days, and what days they were, but Leonard Cohen and David Bowie, the cultural phenomena, will surely outlast us all.

You can listen to Cohen and Bowie’s final albums above. If you need Spotify’s free software, get it here.

Hear Leonard Cohen’s Final Interview: Recorded by David Remnick of The New Yorker

Say Goodbye to Leonard Cohen Through Some of His Best-Loved Songs: “Hallelujah,” “Suzanne” and 235 Other Tracks

David Bowie Sings “Changes” in His Last Live Performance, 2006

Dave: The Best Tribute to David Bowie That You’re Going to See

Death: A Free Philosophy Course from Yale

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist

in Music | August 3rd, 2017

Image by Bryan Costales, via Wikimedia Commons

The Summer of Love was not just a season of great music and the zenith of the flower child, but the culmination of a movement that started back on a chillier Bay Area day, on January 14, 1967. That was the month of the Human Be-In, and what must have looked like a full on invasion of the counterculture into Golden Gate Park. The backdrop of this outpouring of good vibrations was anything but loving: Vietnam, inner city riots, Civil Rights, and a huge generation gap. The crowd size was estimated at 100,000, and everybody there suddenly realized they weren’t alone. They were a force.

Joel Selvin, interviewed by Michael Krasny for this KQED segment on the Summer of Love (listen here), says that the real Summer of Love for San Franciscans at least, happened in 1966, when it was a local secret. One year later, the hippie movement had become mainstream. And that’s when every band on both sides of the Atlantic had turned on to the zeitgeist, and the gates of psychedelic music opened up.

Today, we have a playlist of 89 songs to commemorate the 50th anniversary of that historic summer. (Download Spotify’s free software here, if you need it.) If you are coming to this as a music fan, but not somebody who lived through that era, you might think you know all the songs from that period, having had them hammered into your brain over the years from the ubiquitous hits of classic rock radio, and nostalgic movies.

There are of course the stone cold classics from 1967, with not one but two Beatles releases, including the iconic Sgt. Pepper album; the best two songs from Jefferson Airplane; Procol Harum’s “A Whiter Shade of Pale”; the Who’s best psychedelic song “I Can See for Miles”; Jimi Hendrix’s “Are You Experienced?” and “Hey Joe”; the Rolling Stones’ move into chamber pop with “Ruby Tuesday” and their own trippy “She’s a Rainbow” and “We Love You”—the last time they ever felt lovey dovey about anything; and the first releases by the Doors.

Soul and R’n’B was also at the height of its mid-60s power, with Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” James Brown’s “Cold Sweat,” Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough”, and Sam and Dave’s “Soul Man” infecting the charts.

“We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave,” is how Hunter S. Thompson famously put it in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and this playlist might just convince you of that considering how music seemed to fracture so soon after—even the Beatles would be delivering that strange and sometimes frightening trip of a White Album a year later. Vietnam would continue to drag on, and the decade’s metaphorical end at Altamont was looming on the horizon, not that many could see it. (By the way, Joel Selvin just wrote a very good book on that dark, decade-ending concert.)

Enjoy the playlist and argue over what’s missing in the comments. (No “Waterloo Sunset”? “I Second That Emotion”? “Gloria”? Hmmph!)

Jimi Hendrix Opens for The Monkees on a 1967 Tour; Then After 8 Shows, Flips Off the Crowd and Quits

Paul McCartney Admits to Dropping Acid in a Scrappy Interview with a Prying Reporter (June, 1967)

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

in Music, Poetry | August 2nd, 2017

Note: The first poem and others contain some offensive language.

In the context of the radical socio-political change of 1975, Patti Smith announced herself to the world with Horses, “the first real full-length hint of the artistic ferment taking place in the mid-‘70s at the juncture of Bowery and Bleecker,” writes Mac Randall. Though born in an insular downtown milieu, Smith’s view was vast, conducting the poetry of the past—of Rimbaud, the Beats, and rock and roll—into an uncertain future, through the nascent medium of punk rock. The album is “closely associated with the beginning of something,” and yet is “so concerned with endings”: the loss of Jimi Hendrix (at whose studio Smith recorded), and of “other departed counterculture heroes like Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin and Brian Jones.”

In a way, Smith’s voice defines the pivotal moment in which it arrived: anticipating an anxious age of austerity and women’s liberation; mourning the loss of 60s idealism and the promise of racial equity. She was a female artist fully unconstrained by patriarchal expectations, with complete authority over her vision. “My people were trying to forge a new bridge between the people we had lost and learned from and the future,” she recently remarked.

In her “fabulously grand” way, she told The Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone in 2013, “I felt in the center, not quite the old generation, not quite the new generation. I felt like the human bridge.” Smith was no naïf when she made Horses, but a confident artist who, at 29, had worked in theater with her lately-departed friend Sam Shepard, become her famous lover Robert Mapplethorpe’s favorite subject, joined the St. Mark’s Poetry Project, and published two collections of verse.

She thought of herself as a poet who “got sidetracked” by music. “When I was young,” Smith says, “all I wanted was to write books and be an artist.” But poetry was always central to her work; Horses, she says, “evolved organically” from her first poetry reading, four years earlier, at St. Mark’s Church, alongside Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and other luminaries. Above, you can hear her discuss that attention-grabbing first reading, and at the top of the post, listen to Smith at Columbia University in 1975, reading the poems that developed that year into the songs on Horses, including her 1971 “Oath,” which begins with a variation on Horses’ opening sneer, “Christ died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.”

Be warned the first poem she reads contains offensive language, as do many others. No one should be shocked by this. But some who only know Smith as a singer may be surprised by her masterful literary voice and wicked sense of humor. She has always been an elegist, mourning her cultural heroes, most of whom died young, as well as a tragic string of personal losses. “When I started working with the material that became Horses,” she remembers, “a lot of our great voices had died.” But her intent went beyond elegy, beyond a maudlin appropriation of fading 60s heroes. Smith had a “mission,” she says, of “forming a cultural voice through rock’n’roll that incorporated sex and art and poetry and performance and revolution.” It sounds grandiose, but it’s a mission she’s largely fulfilled. At the center of her project is poetry as performance, as a means of entertaining, shocking, and seducing an audience. The reading at the top is an especially faithful record of her fearless onstage persona.

Find more poetry readings in our collection, 1,000 Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free.

Watch Patti Smith Read from Virginia Woolf, and Hear the Only Surviving Recording of Woolf’s Voice

Patti Smith’s New Haunting Tribute to Nico: Hear Three Tracks

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Discover Langston Hughes’ Rent Party Ads & The Harlem Renaissance Tradition of Playing Gigs to Keep Roofs Over Heads

in History, Jazz, Music, Poetry | August 2nd, 2017

Both communities of color and communities of artists have had to take care of each other in the U.S., creating systems of support where the dominant culture fosters neglect and deprivation. In the early twentieth century, at the nexus of these two often overlapping communities, we meet Langston Hughes and the artists, poets, and musicians of the Harlem Renaissance. Hughes’ brilliantly compressed 1951 poem “Harlem” speaks of the simmering frustration among a weary people. But while its startling final line hints grimly at social unrest, it also looks back to the explosion of creativity in the storied New York City neighborhood during the Great Depression.

Hughes had grown reflective in the 50s, returning to the origins of jazz and blues and the history of Harlem in Montage of a Dream Deferred. The strained hopes and hardships he had eloquently documented in the 20s and 30s remained largely the same post-World War II, and one of the key features of Depression-era Harlem had returned; Rent parties, the wild shindigs held in private apartments to help their residents avoid eviction, were back in fashion, Hughes wrote in the Chicago Defender in 1957.

“Maybe it is inflation today and the high cost of living that is causing the return of the pay-at-the-door and buy-your-own-refreshments parties,” he said. He also noted that the new parties weren’t as much fun.

But how could they be? Depression-era rent parties were legendary. They “impacted the growth of Swing and Blues dancing,” writes dance teacher Jered Morin, “like few other periods.” As Hughes commented, “the Saturday night rent parties that I attended were often more amusing than any night club, in small apartments where God-knows-who lived.” Famous artists met and rubbed elbows, musicians formed impromptu jams and invented new styles, working class people who couldn’t afford a night out got to put on their best clothes and cut loose to the latest music. Hughes was fascinated, and as a writer, he was also quite taken by the quirky cards used to advertise the parties. “When I first came to Harlem,” he said, “as a poet I was intrigued by the little rhymes at the top of most House Rent Party cards, so I saved them. Now I have quite a collection.”

The cards you see here come from Hughes’ personal collection, held with his papers at Yale’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Many of these date from the 40s and 50s, but they all draw their inspiration from the Harlem Renaissance period, when the phenomenon of jazz-infused rent parties exploded. “Sandra L. West points out that black tenants in Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s faced discriminatory rental rates,” notes Rebecca Onion at Slate. “That, along with the generally lower salaries for black workers, created a situation in which many people were short of rent money. These parties were originally meant to bridge that gap.” A 1938 Federal Writers Project account put it plainly: Harlem “was a typical slum and tenement area little different from many others in New York except for the fact that in Harlem rents were higher; always have been, in fact, since the great war-time migratory influx of colored labor.”

Tenants took it in stride, drawing on two longstanding community traditions to make ends meet: the church fundraiser and the Saturday night fish fry. But rent parties could be raucous affairs. Guests typically paid a few cents to enter, and extra for food cooked by the host. Apartments filled far beyond capacity, and alcohol—illegal from 1919 to 1933—flowed freely. Gambling and prostitution frequently made an appearance. And the competition could be fierce. The Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance writes that in their heyday, “as many as twelve parties in a single block and five in an apartment building, simultaneously, were not uncommon.” Rent parties “essentially amounted to a kind of grassroots social welfare,” though the atmosphere could be “far more sordid than the average neighborhood block party.” Many upright citizens who disapproved of jazz, gambling, and booze turned up their noses and tried to ignore the parties.

In order to entice party-goers and distinguish themselves, writes Onion, “the cards name the kind of musical entertainment attendees could expect using lyrics from popular songs or made-up rhyming verse as slogans.” They also “used euphemisms to name the parties’ purpose,” calling them “Social Whist Party” or “Social Party,” while also slyly hinting at rowdier entertainments. The new rent parties may not have lived up to Hughes’ memories of jazz-age shindigs, perhaps because, in some cases, live musicians had been replaced by record players. But the new cards, he wrote “are just as amusing as the old ones.”

via Slate

Langston Hughes Creates a List of His 100 Favorite Jazz Recordings: Hear 80+ of Them in a Big Playlist

Watch Langston Hughes Read Poetry from His First Collection, The Weary Blues (1958)

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inimitable Style

in Music | August 1st, 2017

A tongue-in-cheek essay in McSweeney’s, Michael Fowler’s “How to Play a John Bonham Drum Solo,” contains some of the finest descriptions I’ve read of Bonham’s thunderous playing. It all begins with the triplet, the “thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da, thump-pe-da” rhythm the Led Zeppelin drummer plays on every piece of the kit. Should you learn to play drums like Bonham, you’ll be able to start this “up like a motor,” on any drum, “with either hand or foot, and perform all over the drums, without throwing a stick or becoming entangled in your own limbs, except to be funny.” After Bonham “made the important discovery that all drumming is just triplets, or should be,” he then proceeded to play them while “flying around the kit with blinding speed, hitting every drum and cymbal in those negligible spaces” between the triplets, “jamming like hell inside those brief spaces” then “plunging the whole kit into dead silence.”

Can you learn to do this? Maybe you’ll want a less colorful, more programmatic guide. Bonham himself learned the technique from some of the most furious drummers in jazz, Gene Krupa and Buddy Rich, as the narrator explains in the video above, “What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer?”

We begin with those trademark triplets, then learn of another Bonham signature. While more straightforward drummers like The Stones’ Charlie Watts played strict 4/4 beats with metronomic precision, Bonham was often so far behind the beat it was as if he played his drum parts in an echo chamber, with a syncopated swing he took from funk.

But the heart of Bonham’s distinctive drumming has to do with the unusual dynamic he had with Jimmy Page. Normally, a drummer will lock in with the bass player, providing a solid foundation for the guitars and vocals to stand on. But “the essence… of the whole Zeppelin thing,” says engineer Ron Nevison, “was John Bonham following the guitar. He would take the riff and he would make that his drum part.” We hear several driving examples of this, most notably “Immigrant Song,” above, where Page and Bonham follow each other, while John Paul Jones thunders below them. The result, and one crucial reason Bonham’s hands almost never stop flying around the kit, is that, like Page, he’s playing both rhythm and lead parts, sometimes both at once.

Bonham sets out the scaffolding for Page’s complex phrasing, sometimes creating a push-pull effect that heightens a song’s tension at its core. We hear this in “Kashmir,” where Bonham plays a standard 4/4 beat while Page and the string section play in 3/4 time. These asynchronous passages can prove daunting for accomplished drummers. Bonham frequently pulled them off with the same kind of looseness and panache he brought to all of his playing, with no shortage of triplets and Gene Krupa-like fills thrown in for good measure.

Isolated Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Greatest: Bonham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

Jimmy Page Tells the Story of “Kashmir”

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Raw & Completely Improvised First Show, with Sid Vicious on Drums (1976)

in Music | July 31st, 2017

We could argue all day about whether punk started in the US or UK (it’s the US), but why bother? Why not spend our time doing more interesting things—like digging up rare historical artifacts from the earliest days of punk rock in London, New York and, yes, Detroit. Punk may have devolved into a prêt-à-porter signifier, but its golden age was dominated by bespoke personalities the size of Texas. And no origin story (except maybe this one) better exemplifies punk’s founding ethos than that of Siouxsie and the Banshees’ first gig in London in 1976, which you can hear in all of its definition-of-lo-fi glory in two parts above and below.

Siouxsie Sioux (Susan Janet Dallion) already stood out as one of the Sex Pistols’ dedicated followers, her Egypt-inspired eye makeup and black lipstick staking out the Goth territory she would conquer in just a few short years. She was a born performer, but up until this first appearance at 19, had never been on stage before or fronted a band.

The “band” itself didn’t exist until the last minute, when Siouxsie and bassist Steve Severin (then “Steve Spunker”) decided they should take the place of a group that pulled out of the 100 Club Punk Festival, a showcase for the Sex Pistols, The Clash, The Damned, and a handful of other unsigned (at the time) bands.

“Suzie and the Banshees,” as they were billed, consisted of the magnificently shrill Siouxsie, Severin, future Adam Ant guitarist Marco Pirroni, and the most infamous non-musician in punk, Sid Vicious, on drums, before he pretended to play bass in the Sex Pistols. They hadn’t written any songs, and so they smashed through a 20-minute medley of “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles,” “Knocking on Heaven’s Door,” “Twist and Shout,” and the Lord’s Prayer. Show promoter Ron Watts called it “performance art,” and not in a good way.

Summing up the eternal interplay between punk bands and club owners, Watts remembered their debut as “weak, it was weedy. You couldn’t say it was a gig…. It was just people, getting up and trying to do something. I let them do it, you know.” The supremely confident Siouxsie didn’t care. In an interview a couple of months later (above) she admits, “it got a bit boring in some parts, but it picked up.” So did the band, picking up actually very good drummer Kenny Morris and cycling through a few guitarists, including The Cure’s Robert Smith for a spell. A couple of the other bands at that notorious show made good as well. (One even got their own credit card.) Hear The Clash’s set from the night here, here, and here, and see a photo set of Siouxsie and friends from 1976 here.

via Post Punk

Watch The Cure’s First TV Appearance in 1979 … Before The Band Acquired Its Signature Goth Look

The History of Punk Rock in 200 Tracks: An 11-Hour Playlist Takes You From 1965 to 2016

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967)

in Music | July 27th, 2017

Note: If the video plays and you don’t hear sound, look for the volume control in the lower right hand corner of the video.

Within months of moving to London in autumn of 1966, Jimi Hendrix found himself a band, recorded a single, got himself a longterm girlfriend, and proceeded to take the UK by storm. His gigs were essential viewing by rock’s then-royalty–the Who, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Cream, all made sure they caught the American wonder. By the end of the year his first single “Hey Joe” landed him on British television and in the Top 10.

The above video is the first known footage of a live Jimi Hendrix Experience, though the band had been gigging for months. It takes place at the Chelmsford Corn Exchange, in the City of Chelmsford, about 50 miles north-east of London. The date is February 25, 1967, and the gig had only been advertised in the paper two days before (where he was listed as “Jimi Hendric”). As you can see, that’s all it took to fill this old traders building-turned-rock venue to the rafters.

The footage was shot for “Telixer: A Thing of Beat Is a Joy Forever,” a documentary on the current British music scene made for KRO, The Netherlands.

Hendrix and the band launch into Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” with a few ordinary opening bars setting up the guitar magic to follow. He then plays “Stone Free,” the b‑side of “Hey Joe.” You can see Pete Townshend and John Entwistle to the side of the stage, very briefly. The footage is intercut with shots of Swinging London and fashion hub Portobello Road, where it is said Hendrix bought his Hussars military jacket.

The website Chelmsford Rocks features a remembrance of that night from Shaun Everett, who was a Mod at the time and knew he had to make his way up on the train after work to catch Hendrix at the “Corn’ole,” as the youth called it.

Everett fills in the rest of the evening:

Hendrix gave two sets. That was the normal arrangement for the Corn’ole. Both sets usually 45 minutes to one hour each and there was absolutely no music to be had after 11.30pm…I have spent a long time looking for myself on that film clip but to no avail. I was probably still at the rear of the venue or even more likely in the local pub for the break!…Hendrix, at the end of the performance, walked straight up to a few of us standing just there and one of my mates lit his joint for him. They were so knocked out by that I recall. My recollection was more nasal. Rock musicians have this uncanny ability to harbour their own post-set aromas about themselves: in this case that unmistakeable aroma of cannabis…I will always remember that part even if my music recollections are a bit sparse. I have also ‘dined out’ on that anecdote for many years since. I had passed close by the ‘God’.

The Corn Exchange hosted many acts over its time as a music venue, including David Bowie and Pink Floyd. But in 1969, the city tore down the 19th century building, assuming something more accommodating for live music would be built in its place. That didn’t happen. On this page you can see the aftermath of the bulldozers, and a modern shot of the city street corner that added so much to rock history.

via Guitar World

Jimi Hendrix Plays “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band” for The Beatles, Just Three Days After the Album’s Release (1967)

Hear a Great 4‑Hour Radio Documentary on the Life & Music of Jimi Hendrix: Features Rare Recordings & Interviews

Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the artist interview-based FunkZone Podcast and is the producer of KCRW’s Curious Coast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

by Ted Mills | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Hear the 150 Greatest Albums by Women: NPR Creates a New Canon of Albums That Puts Women at the Center of Music History

in Gender, Music | July 25th, 2017

What is it with all the trendpieces on great women artists, writers, directors, singers, etc.? What, indeed. To ask the question is to acknowledge the premise of such pieces. Why should they need to be written at all if women in these fields received fair representation elsewhere? That lists and articles can be written in the hundreds puts the lie to phony claims that “great” women do not exist in every field in numbers. This is especially true in the 20th century, when hard-won political gains opened cultural doors unimaginable to many previous generations. But those gains did not fundamentally alter how cultural histories have been written.

Music critic Anne Powers and Lincoln Center program director Jill Sternheimer recently considered this problem, one which, Powers writes at NPR, persists even in the ways “music history’s being recorded and revised in the digital age.”

They wondered, “why… was the importance of women so often recognized as a trend instead of a source of lasting impact? We came to a conclusion that, in 2017, will likely strike no one as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins.”

This is a truth reinforced in many different ways: by the shelves weighed down with books about Jimi Hendrix and Nirvana, while only one or two about Aretha Franklin or Patti Smith sit nearby; by the radio playlists that still only feature women once or twice every hour.

This isn’t a problem of “representation”—the term we so often hear applied to casting decisions and awards shows. Powers isn’t making a case for diversity in hiring, but for accuracy in writing the historical record. To that end, Powers and Lincoln Center, together with “nearly 50 women who play a role in NPR… compiled and voted” on a list: “Turning the Tables: The 150 Greatest Albums by Women.” You can hear nearly all of those albums in our Spotify playlist below. Calling the list “an intervention, a remedy, a correction,” Powers writes, “These albums were released between 1964, the year The Beatles invaded America… and 2016, when Beyoncé arguably ushered in a new period with her ‘visual album’ Lemonade.”

The point is to offer a view of popular music history with women’s work at the center. The list does not represent an “alternate history.” It stands for music history, touching upon every significant trend, social issue, set of sonic innovations, and new avenue for self-expression that popular music has intersected in the past fifty years.

Against the argument for “affirmative action”—or simply rewriting old “great album” lists to include more women—Powers argues, “once a canon is formed, it gains an aura of immutability.” Plenty of lists include female artists. Almost none of them include women in the top spots, suggesting that “the paradigms that define greatness remain masculine at their core.” Tokenism, no matter how well-intentioned, does not make for “a shift in perspective beyond the simple mandate to adjust the numbers.”

Ava Duvernay has made a similar argument against mandated “diversity” in Hollywood as a mollifying tactic that maintains status quo power relationships. “The fact that the mainstream starts to gaze at this space doesn’t make it a moment,” she tells Hollywood Reporter, “it makes it a moment for them.” As Powers writes of the way Joni Mitchell was often treated by the rock establishment, “the female musician is a dream, a surprise and a disruptor. She can claim the center of attention, but her rightful point of origin, and the place to which she returns, is a margin.”

Instead of marginal inclusion in existing cliques, Powers argues for a cultural shift, a “new canon,” that isn’t hedged with the usual standards that often exclude women on arbitrary purist grounds. Keeping “wide parameters,” the contributors “left room for acknowledged rock-era classics as well as pop hits dismissed by others as fluff.” That disclaimer aside, there’s precious little “fluff” on this list—meaning it’s hard to find albums here that wouldn’t qualify for “greatest” status on more narrowly-defined genre lists. It is a list, that is to say, of 150 great albums, written, recorded, and released over the course of fifty plus years, by some of the most talented writers, players, and musicians in modern music history.

“Lists have their limitations,” Powers admits, “They reflect biases and whispered compromises.” She and her contributors offer this one “as the beginning of a new conversation” rather than an authoritative statement. At such depth and breadth, however, “Turning the Tables” makes room for nearly every possible genre, from all over the world. Read the full list of 150 albums, with commentary, here. A few of the 150 albums, including Lemonade, Bikini Kill’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, Joan Jett’s I Love Rock ‘n’ Roll, Joanna Newsome’s Ys, and Laurie Anderson’s Big Science aren’t on Spotify, so didn’t make our playlist above. The top ten albums on the list are:

Joni Mitchell, Blue (Reprise, 1971)
Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill (Ruffhouse/Columbia, 1998)
Nina Simone, I Put a Spell on You (Philips, 1956)
Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You (Atlantic, 1967)
Missy Eliot, Supa Dupa Fly (The Goldmine/Elekra, 1997)
Beyoncé, Lemonade (Parkwood/Columbia 2016)
Patti Smith, Horses (Arista, 1975)
Janis Joplin, Pearl (Columbia, 1971)
Amy Winehouse, Back to Black (Island, 2006)
Carole King, Tapestry (Ode, 1971)

1200 Years of Women Composers: A Free 78-Hour Music Playlist That Takes You From Medieval Times to Now

Women of Jazz: Stream a Playlist of 91 Recordings by Great Female Jazz Musicians

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

by Josh Jones | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 22 ) |

How Leonard Cohen & David Bowie Faced Death Through Their Art: A Look at Their Final Albums

89 Essential Songs from The Summer of Love: A 50th Anniversary Playlist

Hear Patti Smith Read the Poetry that Would Become Horses: A Reading of 14 Poems at Columbia University, 1975

Discover Langston Hughes’ Rent Party Ads & The Harlem Renaissance Tradition of Playing Gigs to Keep Roofs Over Heads

What Makes John Bonham Such a Good Drummer? A New Video Essay Breaks Down His Inimitable Style

Hear Siouxsie and the Banshee’s Raw & Completely Improvised First Show, with Sid Vicious on Drums (1976)

Watch the Earliest Known Footage of the Jimi Hendrix Experience (February, 1967)

Hear the 150 Greatest Albums by Women: NPR Creates a New Canon of Albums That Puts Women at the Center of Music History

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