Earlier this year the editor of The Music Club, Simon Hill, asked readers of the site (www.mcz.com/musicclub):
"If you were stranded on a deserted island and had to have only ten albums to take with you, what would they be?"
As an infrequent reader of the website, I found out about it shortly after he had published the list of several members of this music club. But I was promised that even though my list would be submitted late it would be uploaded at some point. Well, needless to say, after sending my rather lengthy list, in descending order and replete with explanations and an honorable mention list, it never got uploaded onto his web site. So a few months later, I took it upon myself to resend my list to Simon, only this time it was ready for upload with Java instructions I had place in myself. It still never got uploaded. By this time I got a little perturbed. After all, everybody else is allowed to have a list about something, and I felt that I had as much to say as anybody else on this or any other subject. Well, by now I am well aware that the only way my list is going to be included is if I upload it myself onto my web page.
So, here it is. My choices for the albums I would take with me to a deserted island. Which, I genuinely believe are the ten best albums ever made. Of course, my list is biased - it is after all my favorite albums. But if you read it you'll see why these are great albums:
1) Purple Rain -- Prince: At a time in the summer of 1984 when I was at my most vulnerable and weakest -- my twin sister had just died -- Prince's album spoke to me in ways that were incalculable. To me, his signature song, "Let's Go Crazy" kept me sane through a tough time (now how is that for irony?). That aside, this was the quintessential album of the 80's. There was nobody in music who could rock harder and funk heavier, two disciplines which were thought of as mutually exclusive beforehand, than Prince, and he did it mostly at the same time. Enormously popular before this 1984 release, Prince brought us to the highest rock high, broke our hearts, got risqué and serenaded us all at the same time. And if you don't think so, just watch the motion picture by the same name, which brings all the music on this album into clearer focus. Combining equal parts Jimmy Hendrix, Bob Dylan and George Clinton, there is no other album before or since which could bring out the whole range of emotions with such a wide array of rhythmic textures. That alone puts it at the summit. HONORABLE MENTION: "Purple Haze" - Jimmy Hendrix; "1999" - Prince; "Ain't No 'Bout-A-Doubt It" - Graham Central Station; "Free Your Mind And Your Ass Will Follow" -- Funkadelic.
2) Superfly -- Curtis Mayfield: The first truly "theme" album by an African-American, this album was instant attitude. If you're driving down the road and the title song comes on the radio, you lean the seat back, your eyelids droop, and suddenly you're baaad - rolling down the street in a purple Cadillac at midnight. It is a testament to Mayfield's genius that you were injected with a healthy dose of black pride, ghetto reality, and even empathy for a junkie. Mayfield had already been considered a musical genius through his work in the Sixties with the Impressions and his writing in the Seventies for such musical heavyweights as the Staple Singers and Gladys Knight and the Pips. But this solo masterpiece - the soundtrack to the notorious blaxsploitation film of the same name - sealed his place as one of the most profound and eloquently poetic musicians in history. With his soulfully succinct eloquence coupled with a funky Pan-African conga tapestry, Mayfield told the story of a Harlem coke pusher's quest to make one last million-dollar score, then split the game to start a clean slate. The high-roller/player's lifestyle (pimped-out attire, flashy cars, and foxy women) was the stuff of ghetto legend, providing a seedy allure to what is, in reality, a pathetically vicious cycle of sinister crime. Mayfield did a better job of telling this story than the film, and this album touched a nerve among African Americans everywhere so much that it's influence and importance is just too impossible to overstate or measure. Nobody before or since has told such a tragic story so rhythmically poetic as Mayfield. Only he could sum up the conflation of ghetto commerce in just four words: "Tryin' ta get over." HONORABLE MENTION: "One Nation Under A Groove" - Funkadelic; "Funkentelechy vs. The Placebo Syndrome" -- Parliament.
3) Jungle Boogie -- Kool And The Gang: When this album came out in 1973 there was nothing before it that was as funky, primal, or raw. The baseline tapestry was harder and bumpier than anything that had come before it. Taking such hard rock riffs from musicians like Sly Stone and combining it with Afro R&B soulfulness, it was the precursor to the funk era that was to be personified in short order by George Clinton and the P-Funk Family of artists. Despite their mainstream popularity that would follow towards the end of the decade with the addition of lead singer James Taylor, Kool and the Gang would never again come close to duplicating anything this great. HONORABLE MENTION: "Go For Your Guns" - The Isley Brothers; "Slave", "Stellar Fungk" - Slave.
4) Mothership Connection -- Parliament: The album which started the funk era and introduced the masses to George Clinton's super-ego Dr. Funkenstein and the P-Funk family. No single album would do more to define a sub-genre of music more than this one. Although having been around making music for close to 15 years, it was through this album that Clinton discovered the overwhelming possibilities of the Moog synthesizer (adeptly played by Bernie Worrell) fused with the hard-driving rock riffs of the electric guitar, both in conjunction with the fender bass (deftly played by William "Bootsy" Collins) not just to prop up the beat in the background but as a driving instrument at the front of any tune. A defining moment in the history of popular African-American music. Need proof? Listen to any R&B, Funk, Hip-Hop, Rap or New Jack tune in the last 25 years and try not to find influences or samplings of "W-E-F-U-N-K", "Mothership Connection", "Give Up The Funk", "Night of the Thumpasaurus People". HONORABLE MENTION: "The Clones of Dr. Funkenstein" - Parliament; "Hardcore Jollies", "Cosmic Slop" - Funkadelic.
5) Headhunters -- Herbie Hancock: Before this album's 1972 release Hancock had already been one of the most well-respected keyboard players in jazz, playing with such luminaries as Miles Davis and Art Blakey. But after having played in Davis's historic "Bitches Brew" sessions, Hancock realized the potential musical ramifications of jazz fusion and its ability to bring together sounds and tapestries never thought compatible. The first musician to use the synthesizer extensively, Hancock fused together a new R&B form called funk with rock, jazz and awesome percussions (as historically played by Bill Summers) into a tapestry and texture that would influence a whole new generation of superstars from Steve Wonder to George Clinton to Howard Jones to Jeff Lorber. HONORABLE MENTION: "Sun Goddess" - Ramsey Lewis; "Dookey Stick" - George Duke.
6) Bitches Brew -- Miles Davis: Considered by contemporary society as the greatest jazz musician, Davis was already a historical jazz figure even before this 1969 session. Only Davis could make his trumpet play with such expressiveness never before seen in musical history. In the 60's, though, Davis was by now mixing sounds and rhythms never before put to music and creating a form of jazz, fusion, that would take his contemporaries years to understand. In 1969, he got together with some of history's most respected jazz musicians -- Wayne Shorter, Bernie Maupin, Bill Summers, Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, Lenny White, Billy Cobham, Harvey Brooks, Jack DeJohnette, and Ron Carter -- and put together a jam session of surreal fusion at its rawest and most unformed. It wasn't until well into the next decade when the enormity of this session's influence on both jazz and popular music would be felt, and Miles Davis would take his place as one of the 20th century's greatest artists. HONORABLE MENTION: "Straight Life" - Freddie Hubbard; "Blue Trane" - John Coltrane; "Straight, No Chaser" - Thelonious Monk.
7) It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back -- Public Enemy: By 1989, Hip Hop and rap had hit society like a bomb, but with the release of this searingly rough, scorchingly loud chant on social commentary, Public Enemy made rap more than just a rhythmic urban musical form. Combining Chuck D's angry lyrics with Flavor Flav's expressive way of delivering them and Terminator X's scathing mixing, Public Enemy paved the way for socially and politically aware hip hop artists to be heard in the mainstream, and scared the hell out of a lot of white people over the age of forty. HONORABLE MENTION: "Straight Outta Compton" - NWA; "The Low End Theory" - A Tribe Called Quest; "The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill" - Lauryn Hill.
8) The Dream Of The Blue Turtles -- Sting: The album which personified the 80's crossover appeal into the mainstream. While most of the hip crowd hated crossover music because it was deemed "sellout", those of us who actually took the time to listen to most of the crossover music were able to find a few gems in the gunk. This one certainly qualified. Sting, already considered one of the best musicians in the world with his work with the Police, struck out on his own and came up with this soulfully relevant R&B masterpiece. Weaving R&B with jazz and popular music (one of the artists he worked with was Branford Marsalis), Sting mesmerized us with tales of love, rejection, the blues, death, nuclear holocaust, and political hypocrisy all in one album. The result defied categorization, and it was mesmerizing. If this was crossover, then I want more like it. HONORABLE MENTION: "Songs From The Big Chair" -- Tears For Fears; "So" - Peter Gabriel; "Brothers In Arms" - Dire Straits.
9) A Night In Tunisia -- Charlie Parker: While John Coltrane did it better, Yardbird did it first. We don't have benefit of a large body of work from 'Bird because he died too young and didn't do a whole lot of studio music before his death, but what little he did was tremendous. With Dizzy Gillespie on trumpet, Art Blakey on drums, and Buddy Powell on bass, Parker played the tenor sax with absolute musical genius. That he could come up with floral jazz notes this expressive with as tortured a soul as he had and without benefit of formal musical training is beyond the imagination. Parker was able to meld all kinds of different brass tapestries into his sax playing in ways never heard before, and in no other work of his is this more evident than here. Yardbird, we hardly knew ye'. HONORABLE MENTION: "Breezin'", "Give Me The Night" - George Benson; "Mr. Magic" - Grover Washington, Jr.
10) Thriller -- Michael Jackson: Actually, it's not so much Jackson I credit this album's greatness to as much as the producer and arranger behind it, Quincy Jones, who as arguably the greatest musical talent of the latter part of the 20th century deserves to be on this list somewhere. Jones' body of work -- in television, movies, music and concerts -- is so overwhelming and too numerous to mention, so I chose this album as representative of it. Never mind the eight #1 songs, nine Grammy awards it received, or the over 42 million copies it sold to put it securely as the best-selling album of all time. What makes this Jones's finest hour is the talent intertwined here (Eddie Van Halen on electric guitar; Vincent Price rapping), the use of special effects and sound fusion (Bill Summers, Herbie Hancock, the Apple IIe computer-synthesizer), and a universal array of ethnic musical styles and rhythms. Michael Jackson took all the kudos but Quincy Jones deserves a lion's share of the credit. HONORABLE MENTION: "The Dude" - Quincy Jones; "Songs In The Key Of Life" - Stevie Wonder; "Donna Summers" - Donna Summers.
David Kennedy -- the creator and editor of the on-line cyberzine Psrhea and the host of the radio talk show The Sport Authority on 91.5 FM The Voice in Sacramento, CA. -- has been making noises and finding the evidence of things not seen for most of his thirty-eight years. This would be less of a problem for him if he could just find someplace that sells motrin and prozac over-the-counter -- cheap!