Love not romance: Ranking Pazz & Jop’s 1989 singles

As raw, straightforward, and multi-dimensionally flavorful like sushi, Neneh Cherry’s debut album still startles; I play it a couple times a year still impressed by its verve. “Manchild” invented British trip-hop, and it’s not a tall claim. 1989’s singles were like that, opening doors that wouldn’t shut soon. “She Drives Me Crazy’s falsetto and thwacking

Easy like Sunday morning: the best of Lionel Richie and the Commodores

No late twentieth century popular icon has suffered vacillations in critical ardor as severely as Lionel Richie. Okay, lemme retract: has Richie ever warmed his feet to critical ardor? As singer and songwriter for the mildly funky Commodores, he showed far more interest in balladry and, interestingly, a polished studio kind of country-pop that would

I will sleep with a clear conscience: Ranking Pazz & Jop’s 1990 singles

After a day of end-of-semester grading and filing two professional pieces, I have no wish to write my contextual preface other than to say Soho’s “Hippychick” rules and I had no idea P&J voters thought highly enough of it. What with the loathsome but influential “Poison,” the B-52’s even better than the real thing “Roam,”

In which Cuban snowflakes melt.

Few things excite me than pissing off these gibbering monkeys: The billboard, which reads “No a los dictadores, no a Trump” – “No to dictators, no to Trump” – was posted Monday along the Palmetto Expressway near Northwest 67th Avenue by an anti-Trump outside group called Mad Dog PAC. It depicts Trump and the late

‘The Old Oak’ is a welcome didactic embrace of communitarianism

The blight of recent times has taken its toll on TJ Ballantyne. His pub The Old Oak earns less business these days as mining jobs in County Durham have disappeared. It’s 2016. Brexit is in the air. The natives are surly, require scapegoats. Then Syrian refugees pour into the town, one of whom, Yara gets

We’ll call him Nate: Ranking Pazz & Jop’s 1987 singles

Skeptics of 1985 and 1986 voting patterns will crack their skulls on the pavement looking at these mostly lethargic finishers — lethargic in the abstract, that is. A well-meaning Prince song topped the chart, competing with Suzanne Vega’s equally well-meant breakthrough. R.E.M offered brawnier goods on their own breakthrough album than their first pop hit

The best Beatles songs by Paul McCartney

Having done my part showcasing his solo years in several places, I turn to the period when he worked as composer, singer, and bassist for what mate George Harrison called his other band. I don’t mind McCartney playing the sap: John Lennon had as many, which is to say, not many. I prefer him when

Boy, you turn me: Ranking 1980’s Pazz & Jop singles

Yesterday I complained about the reluctance to list pop hits on the 1979 poll; voters redressed the dearth the following year, and then some. Now we can get, to quote Jermaine Jackson, serious. “Miss You” might’ve made a 1978 singles chart; the squawking “Emotional Rescue” — a textbook example of awful single from an excellent

Misusin’ your influence: the best of Kendrick Lamar

At this moment no other hip-hop figure touches Kendrick Lamar’s cultural preeminence with my college-aged students. Roddy Ricch, DaBaby, and Polo G  — who? Lamar is their Beatles: never taken for granted. From DAMN‘s impressive 2017 performance — three consecutive months in the top three, culminating in a return to #1 in late August —

Home is I don’t know: Ranking 1979 Pazz & Jop winners

The year when disco went splat had the acts below jiggling in a danse macabre. Credit stagflation, the audience, drugs, and their personal stages, for Talking Heads, Michael Jackson, Marianne Faithfull, Blondie, Van Morrison, and many others went as bonkers as Lindsey Buckingham did on Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk (and he had to ply his bandmates

The best alternative rock songs

Impressed by the airplay for and growing album sales of acts whose maturity happened on American college radio, programmers invented a format called “modern rock,” a moniker as empty as “genuine chocolate flavored drink” or “compassionate conservatism.” On its Billboard debut in 1988, Siouxsie and the Banshees’ “Peek-a-Boo” topped the chart. During the Poppy Bush

It took just one hit: Ranking Pazz & Jop’s 1986 singles

With few as startling as their cousins in the previous three years, 1986’s P&J good to great finalists aren’t startling one-offs so much as choice cuts from albums of uhhh variable quality. In a column published in my college paper twenty years ago, I performed a helluva fan dance about my sexuality framed around the