Jeremy's 300 All-Time Favorite Albums: Nos. 10 to 01

Other Pages in this list: Nos. 300-286 Nos. 285-271 Nos. 270-257 Nos. 256-241 Nos. 240-225 Nos. 224-209 Nos. 208-192 Nos. 191-175 Nos. 174-158 Nos. 157-141 Nos. 140-124 Nos. 123-107 Nos. 106-91 Nos. 90-75 Nos. 74-59 Nos. 58-43 Nos. 42-27 Nos. 26-11

Well, it has been a long and arduous road that has led me through these posts, made even longer by the fact that I really took my time writing these entries, this is why they are so long, it didn't feel right trying to knock out a few at a time. I started writing this beast of a project during the third week of January and now here we are: five months and two hundred and ninety albums later, we have made it to the Promiseland, where only a fabled ten remain. Let's get to the music!

​​10. The Beatles - Revolver

Year of Release: 1966

My favorite Beatles album, Revolver has no bad songs on it. This is also the album that helped us all realize that Don Draper was no longer in touch with the people that he was trying to advertise to (although I think it might have been a bad move for Megan to have recommended that he listen to Tomorrow Never Knows first). Revolver was a turning point for the band, they began experimenting more in the studio, and this album also features their first songs that aren't about love (technically the first of these songs was Paperback Writer, which was released as a non-album single between Rubber Soul and Revolver). The opening track is Harrison's Taxman, a protest song against the British government's tax policies of the time. This is followed by the beautiful Eleanor Rigby, a song that features only McCartney representing the band, with all of the music created by a string octet. I'm Only Dreaming is as at once both as cloudy and as sunny as the title sounds, with Lennon's vocals drifting in and out of sleepiness. Love You To is Harrison's first real ode to the sitar. For No One is a simple little McCartney ballad, which repeats the lines, "And in her eyes you see nothing, no sign of love behind the tears, cry for no one, a love that should have lasted years." This leads straight into Dr. Robert, an uptempo Lennon song about a drug dealer (a drug dealer named John Lennon). This album is the first of a three-album-run of albums that rightfully jettisoned The Beatles from greatest band at the time to the Greatest Band of All Time.

Song: I'm Only Sleeping

​​09. Radiohead - In Rainbows

Year of Release: 2007

This album is monumental for two different reasons: 1) This was the first album that was released immediately after it was finished. Radiohead got tired of the record label scene, so they finished the album and put it on their website, telling listeners to pay whatever they wanted for the album. I paid zero dollars, but I later bought it on CD, so I feel alright about my decision. 2) This is also the pinnacle of the second half of Radiohead's career (thus far), with the pinnacle of the first half being Kid A. This album permeated all of my life and culture when it came out. Since it was released digitally (who'd have thought that would have worked?!?), everyone started listening to it at the same time, and I remember people already forming opinions on Facebook the first day. And the reason everyone had opinions is because this album is spectacular. There is so much attention to detail on this album (something that it seems like broke the band for a short time, leading to them releasing the less-frills King of Limbs as their next album). There are so many little things on this album that put it over the edge (you know other than the superior song writing and performances by the members), for instance on the opener 15 Step, there are four different times that the same sample of some kids proclaiming "Yay" is used, and it makes sense every time, it's part of the rhythm of the song. This album is also the last time that Jonny Greenwood really seemed interested in playing rock guitar, everything after has been lighter, or usually some form of symphony work. But luckily we got this album first, because Greenwood's guitar is the highlight on a number of songs: Bodysnatchers is led by his fuzzed out guitar line, Faust Arp by him strumming an acoustic guitar over a symphony while Thom Yorke quietly mumbles his lyrics. But Greenwood doesn't steal the show, everyone plays a big part. Philip Selway's drums set the stage for the entirety of Weird Fishes/Arpeggi, with the guitar lines plucked around the steady, tinny drum beat that runs the length of the song. That song bubbles, it's really lovely. Yorke's lyrical songwriting is in top form on this album as well, I especially love the scene set in House of Cards, when he sings about being in love with someone who is already in a relationship, trying to lure her away, he proposes, "The infrastructure will collapse, From voltage spikes, Throw your keys in the bowl, Kiss your husband 'good night'." This album is absolutely lovely, and is so pretty in a way that other bands seem to momentarily touch but only Radiohead manages to continuously achieve.

Song: Weird Fishes/Arpeggi

​​08. Deftones - Diamond Eyes

Year of Release: 2010

I have never lost faith in Deftones, but I came close. After White Pony rocked my simple little brains out, Deftones released their self titled album and followed that up with Saturday Night Wrist, both albums that I thoroughly enjoy (they're both on this list somewhere), but the self-titled album was a step towards the mainstream and Saturday Night Wrist was a sort of arty deviation. While they were working on the followup to that album, bassist Chi Cheng was in a car accident and fell into a coma. The band ditched the album they'd started working on and took a break. I was in college at this time, and I was beginning to fear that I may had seen the end of one of my favorite bands. But then they brought in Sergio Vega from Quicksand to permanently replace Cheng, and this was the first album that the new configuration put out, it's freaking loud and brutal, and it is my favorite Deftones album. The star of the show for this album is Stephen Carpenter's guitar, it's the leading lady in every song, taking center stage with singer Chino Moreno. Carpenter's guitar works in so many different ways, it moves like a cyclone on Royal, weaving a pattern of sinister noise that reaches a pinnacle in the closing thirty seconds when Moreno screams "Take me up!" and the guitar takes over and swirls around everything, lifting the listener up until the song ends abruptly, and the guitar jumps back in to start the next song Cmnd/Ctrl, a song with no vocal choruses, but rather one big guitar solo to substitute. You've Seen the Butcher starts with just Carpenter's guitar and Abe Cunningham's drums, setting the dark tone of the song's subject matter before Moreno comes in with the opening lines "Don't want to take it slow, I want to take you home, and watch the world explode from underneath your glow." There are only two slower songs on the album, Beauty School and Sextape, and both of them are beautiful, leaving a small amount of open space on an album otherwise filled to the brim with sound. Carpenter's guitar opens Rocket Skates like a buzzsaw, cutting through the silence and leaving nothing else for the listener's ear to gravitate towards. The album ends with This Place is Death, which I think is named after an episode of Lost (by "I think" I mean "I hope"). This album is one of the best rockers I know of. (Editor's Note Oct. '18: Also, look how beautiful that album cover is.)

Song: Royal

​​07. Gorillaz - Plastic Beach

Year of Release: 2010

I graduated from Illinois in December of 2009, not exactly a great time in the economical history of our country, so I spent the first four months out of college working two full time jobs, one at a hospital transporting patients, and the second as a pizza delivery guy for Pizza Hut. By the time March rolled around, I was starting to get burned out; my entire life had become work and I felt like my soul was being stifled, and one of the key components in this mud stew was that I wasn't finding any new music that I liked. Then at the end of March I bought this Gorillaz album and the Spoon album Transference that had come out a few months earlier, and suddenly I had found something culturally that made me feel happy. These two albums both struck in me in a special way, and they anchored me, in a way, to the creative exploratory freedom that categorized my collegiate years, and really helped me mentally get my shit together. But what is this album, what made it so revelatory? Damon Albarn took the "electronic/hip hop groove session in a warzone" vibe of Demon Days and adapted it to tell a story of consumerism and falseness (both mental and physical, hence the title of the album: Plastic Beach). Plastic Beach opens with the aptly titled Orchestral Intro, a gentle lullaby to ease you into the Snoop Dogg led actual intro Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach, an intro track that features the line "Drinking lemonade, in the shade, getting blazed with a gang of pilgrims" over a pretty simple keyboard beat, Snoop Dogg doesn't need much help to create swagger. This album is full of guest spots, which on first listen can make the album seem less a Gorillaz album and more a big mixtape, but with repeated listens, one begins to enjoy the collaborations as they bring some extra flavor to each track, and usually the guest vocalists provide something that Albarn wouldn't be able to supply as a singer. White Flag features British rappers Bashy and Kano throwing raps around over background music supplied by The Lebanese National Orchestra for Oriental Arabic Music. Mos Def pops up twice, rapping the intro on Stylo and taking front and center on the goof ball antics of Sweepstakes. The electronic band Little Dragon contribute on Empire Ants, the ultimate slow burner, starting super quiet before exploding for the second half of the song, and their singer, Yukimi Nagano, also appears on (and co-wrote) the breezy To Binge later on the album. This album even has a song sung by Lou Reed, a surprisingly danceable track at that. But the real star of the collaboration variety is the now-late Bobby Womack. He shows the range of his presence on just two appearances: his voice blisters the choruses on Stylo (also that video has Bruce Willis in it), but on The Cloud of Unknowing he sings gently, encompassing every sad word, allowing the listener to feel the optimistic sadness of the song. All this praise is before we even get to my favorite song on the album, and my favorite Gorillaz song altogether: Broken. The song is sung only by Albarn, over a keyboard beat created on the organ setting. It's so simple but also so heartbreaking, the story of a doomed relationship, "There's nothing you can do for them, They are the force between, When the sunlight is arising, There's nothing you can say to her, I am without a heart, And the space has been broken. It's Broken, our love is broken." Such a great song.

Song: Broken

​​06. Spoon - Transference

Year of Release: 2010

So after I graduated from Illinois, I was working two jobs and was burnt out and.......wait a minute, I just told this story. So yeah, I bought this album at the same time as Plastic Beach (kind of like my own personal musical equivalent of the Bulls getting Pippen and Grant in the same draft). I think I mentioned this in my entry for Gimme Fiction (No. 148), but my views on the ranking of Spoon albums does not seem to jive with the typical view of the musical community in general, and this disconnect reaches its farthest reaches when it comes to Transference. Most fans seem to consider this album to be a throwaway, not up to the same production values, but the same things that other fans dislike are what makes the album endearing to me. After the "produced to a sharp metal point" sound of Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, Spoon set out to make an album that didn't have so much post-work dedicated to it, the result sounds more like a demo than it does the albums that preceded it. There are lots of little one second snippets of vocals and sound effects, lots of rough edges that give the songs character that can be missing when you smooth out everything interesting. Before Destruction opens the album with a taste of what's to come: a stuttering drum snare, a distorted keyboard line to start the song, and Britt Daniel's vocals which start as if they are recorded in a closet for the intro before the other instruments start up and the vocals get louder and more focused. This song also contains my favorite line of the album, "Just as your leaving, you turn around and take cold shot, just as you're turning your back." You can just feel that slap in the face and bail moment. Is Love Forever? features Daniel's voice with an inconsistent echo, sometimes echoing properly but other times the echo stops after just one word or it'll cut out mid line. The Mystery Zone is guided by Rob Pope's consistent bass line, while Daniel finds endless things to say that end in the term Mystery Zone, and I have listened to this album so many times that I know the one time that it cuts out right after the M sound, the one time out of what has to be thirty different times it's mentioned. Who Makes Your Money is a quirky little track set over a softened keyboard line, and lots of weird echo effects. The most traditional Spoon rock song on this album is Trouble Comes Running, usually I shy away from their more straight forward songs because they are boring (specifically You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb from the album before this one, I freaking hate that song), but I like even that song on this album. My favorite tracks on Transference are the meandering I Saw the Light, which starts like a traditional Spoon rocker and halfway through abandons the structure of the song and turns into a slowly growing instrumental section, and the slow Out Go the Lights, a song about how a person's memories of someone else can often be boiled down to a series of mental snapshots. Transference and Plastic Beach will always have a special place in my heart, not only for being two amazing albums but for letting me know that there is still life even after you realize that being an adult literally means banging your head against a wall over and over again for the rest of your life.

Song: Got Nuffin'

​​05. Radiohead - Kid A

Year of Release: 2000

Every year, my high school would host a Variety Show, basically a non-competitive talent show. My freshman year, my friend Brandon and I went to the Variety Show with his sister Kayla (who I had a crush on for the entirety of my childhood. One time I told Brandon that I was going to let my hair grow a little longer so that I would look like Brandon Boyd from Incubus, and Kayla stuck her head in the room and said "Nothing you ever do will allow you to look like Brandon Boyd." That one still stings these many years later). At the Variety Show a band called In Limbo (named after a song from this album) played the third track from Kid A, The National Anthem. It blew my freaking mind. They had enlisted people from the band to play all of the horn pieces, and the singer was doing an admirable Thom Yorke impression. It was amazing. When I got home that night I went straight to my dad's CDs and checked to see if that song was on the Radiohead album that he had. It was. What I heard next was like no music I had ever heard before, it didn't adhere to any rules of what music should be. Everything In Its Right Place opens the album like a digital iceberg melting in the sun, synth beats falling down a hill while Thom Yorke's voice is digitized and skipped in the background. Even when Yorke starts singing for real, his background vocals are constantly interrupted by little frequency swooshes, like his vocals are being transmitted from somewhere else to your speakers. This is followed up the title song, Kid A, which sounds like a lullaby being played on a small instrument by an alien parent to their infant alien child, Yorke's vocals are so distorted and pitched that he sounds like a barely intelligible computer, and despite this, the song still has an undeniable warmth to it. Next is the cacophonous The National Anthem that sparked my interest to start, a song that starts with some spunky energy (and also the first real guitar of the album) and builds up until there are horns exploding everywhere and all kinds of madness that is only held together by the bass line played by Yorke throughout the entire song. This crazy ending could not be juxtaposed any harder against its polar opposite as it leads into the extremely quiet and slow moving How To Disappear Completely, a haunting song with an extended orchestral presence that's about feeling like a ghost, with the repeated line "I'm not here, this isn't happening." This is followed by Treefingers, an ambient instrumental track which sounds like life being nurtured by sunlight. This leads into two songs with relatively traditional song structure, Optimistic and In Limbo, which probably sound like what most people thought the followup to OK Computer would sound like, but both are still great songs, In Limbo especially has a great guitar line that runs throughout it's length before the vocals start to melt and distort which leads perfectly into the next song Idioteque which basically sounds like if a robot had the hiccups and was also throwing up at the same time, but good somehow. Like really good. They close the album with the downtrodden Morning Bell and the very sparse Motion Picture Soundtrack, which completes out the album that taught me it's alright for music to sound different from what's on the radio, and that sometimes you have to give something a couple of listens before you figure it out; an album that changed what popular rock music could be.

Song: Everything In Its Right Place

​​04. No Doubt - Tragic Kingdom

Year of Release: 1995

Sometime during 1996 or 1997, I checked this CD out from the library, and when I had to return it, I borrowed a copy of Tragic Kingdom from my friend Jamie, and when I returned that copy to my friend, I obtained a copy of my own. That is the story of how I became a fan of No Doubt, my favorite band of all time, and this is Tragic Kingdom, my favorite album by my favorite band. I used to listen to this album for hours on end while I was playing Sim City on my computer (same goes for Kid A). No Doubt was the first concert I ever went to (other than the many fest concerts I saw with my parents, but I never chose to go see Pat Benatar or Cheap Trick, those things just happened). The first time I saw them was their first concert of the Return of Saturn tour at Riviera Theater, I saw them again in high school at Purdue University (the Chicago show sold out too quickly), and then saw them again with Blink 182 in Tinley Park. Those were my first three concerts. And it's not like this album opened my eyes or anything, it was just a rock album that I started listening to, really liked, and then never stopped liking. It remained in my rotation for pretty much my entire childhood. The album opens with the familiar crash of drums and gentle trumpet of Spiderwebs, giving the listener a good taste of what's to come. Tom Dumont's guitar is still pretty rock heavy on this album, before he mellowed out and started playing pop guitar later in the band's career, and it gives many of the songs on the album an edge that would be missing from the pseudo-ska proceedings otherwise. Excuse Me Mr. is a straight forward rock track, with Gwen Stefani singing in her most aggressive manner. Just A Girl is fun and bubbly, the perfect entry drug into the band's music, both for myself and most of America. I'm going to stop with the track by track because I'm having a hard time properly describing this album, I suppose because it's so ingrained into my mind and life, it would be like trying to describe to someone what it feels like to breath. So I'll just go simple; my favorite song on this album has always been Sunday Morning, but other super strong entries are the sprawling six-and-a-half-minute The Climb and the pleading End It On This. I love No Doubt with all my heart, I will never miss a concert that they perform in the city I am living in for the rest of my life. (Editor's Note Oct. '18: Although, who knows if that will ever even happen again?)

Song: Sunday Morning

​​03. Dada - Puzzle

Year of Release: 1992

I have been listening to this album for as long as I can remember. My parents had it on CD and cassette, and I bought it on CD for myself when I moved out of the house. There has been no time during my conscious life that I have not been listening to Puzzle (which I suppose means that my conscious life began when I was five). It's the perfect alternative rock album, three dudes making rock music with interesting variations from song to song. Dorina opens with a lowkey bass line and gentle drum hits that are punctuated by the gently squealing (does that makes sense?) guitar that takes the forefront when no one's singing. Everything stays pretty slow paced besides the guitar solos that erupt from the ends of the choruses. This is followed by Mary Sunshine Rain, a song about losing a woman which opens with the lines "Mary won't be comin' 'round no more, I won't touch her violet hair, That fell like rain and filled the air with roses," and contains a super bendy guitar solo. Dog is played on an acoustic guitar, a meditation on afterlife possibilities and mortality, first describing a "painted old lady, collecting splinters on the bench, she's waiting to go to heaven" this is a woman that thinks she knows where she's heading and is silently waiting out her mortal existence. This description is juxtaposed in the next line with the "one-eyed old man, with his party hats on, he swears there is no hell." This is a man who thinks there is nothing waiting after this life, so he's living it to the fullest. The chorus claims "I know a girl who believes she used to be a dog." All these different viewpoints, but the song concludes "It don't matter what I say, cuz no one is right and no one is wrong, I guess we'll find out one day, that no one was right and no one was wrong." Dog leads into perhaps Dada's most popular song, Dizz Knee Land, which ends on a finger needling guitar solo, before we slow it down a little on the ghostly Surround. The ghostly tone is created by the acoustic guitar and by Joie Calio basically singing in a whisper, letting Michael Gurley provide the depth with his backup vocals during the choruses, which consist only of the line "You surround me." Here Today Gone Tomorrow tells a surreal tale of heading West and taking life as it comes to you, a tale that involves going to the Playboy ranch, running into Jack Webb, robbing a bank, and shacking up with a hitchhiker named Tina, not to mention the cat named Ringo that purrs like leather. Posters tells the best tale of hooking up with someone this side of Norwegian Wood (This Bird has Flown), describing the experience with random details, let's list some of them: "Her hair hung red around her ripped blue jeans, She said she was Jim Morrison incarnate, A psychic on La Brea told her so, She asked me if I ever read Lolita, She took my hand and lead me to her door" with the chorus simply stating the proposition, "Let's go to my room, I'll show you my posters. Let's go to my room, baby, I'll show you I'm a lover." That romp leads into the most serious song on the album, Timothy, a story about a little boy whose family situation is a fucking mess so he lives in a fantasy world that he's made up in his head, with his claims of "My dad's real cool, he discovered Mars, and my mom is a movie star" eventually spiraling into the revealing "My dad's drunk in a bar, and my mom's crashed the car." It's a heartbreaking song and it's played out over a background string trio. After this is one of the other popular songs from this album, Dim, a pretty straight forward alternative rocker. The last three songs on the album slow things down, with Who You Are featuring Gurley singing about trying to forget someone over a quietly needling guitar, with the chorus lamenting "I could set this cold blue world ablaze, but the sun would still rise, and I could never replace who you are." Puzzle is a slow burner, with quiet verses and louder choruses. Puzzle serves as a perfect segue into the final track on the album, Moon. It's such a quiet song, it starts with a barely audible guitar line that slowly gets a little louder, with Calio whispering his vocals, until he slowly switches to shouting his vocals, bringing out the pain in his lyrics. This album is perfect.

Song: Posters

​​02. Lostprophets - The Fake Sound Of Progress

Year of Release: 2001

I've told this story previously but bear with me here. When my siblings and I got our Playstation 2 from Santa, it came with the game ATV Offroad Fury 2, and that game had a killer soundtrack. It had entries from Garbage (Parade), Alien Ant Farm (Courage), System of a Down (Science), the only good Deadsy song ever made (The Key to Gramercy Park), and my favorite Jurassic 5 song (What's Golden). But also on this soundtrack was a song called Shinobi Vs. Dragon Ninja by a band called Lostprophets. I had never heard this song previous to our adventures on digital all-terrain vehicles, but it got to the point that I would listen to that song and when it ended, I would go back into the settings menu and replay it again, so that it was the only song I was playing to. Shinobi Vs. Dragon Ninja made it's way through my friends: my friend James had the album on CD, my friend Danny and I would watch the video on whatever website we watched videos on before YouTube (probably MTV's website). When I wrote about Orgy's Candyass, I said that there was a period of my life when it was my favorite album, but that period ended when I bought The Fake Sound of Progress, and Lostprophets' first album shot to the top of my list. So yes, I do have a nu-metal album as my second best album ever, but what do you expect? I was in junior high when nu-metal was popular, it was bound to seep into me at that young age. This album is loud, the quiet songs are only quiet temporarily, before things get loud again, but the loud moments are my favorites. In my mind, I've always split the album into three sections. The first four songs fill out the first section. Shinobi Vs. Dragon Ninja opens the album strong, with big crunchy guitars during the verses, then they quiet it down during the bridges, and pump it back up for the choruses. Ian Watkins's vocals are the smooth connector throughout the different areas of the song, allowing the music to switch tones without seeming disjointed. This is followed by the title track of the album, The Fake Sound of Progress, a slower song, which still has it's moments of thundering guitar (specifically during the choruses and during the instrumental outro), but mostly lives in an area occupied by Morning View era Incubus, lots of gentle guitar and random scratches from the turntables (isn't it funny how rock music scorned scratching after nu-metal fizzled out, and then EDM came along and DJ's got a bunch richer than the rock artists?). Five Is a Four Letter Word opens with a dizzy guitar line, which is built upon for some more power. One of the quieter songs on this album is And She Told Me To Leave, with the verses containing only Watkins's vocals and a soft sad guitar, and the noise only arriving during the second half of the choruses, before the outro turns into something close to the lengthy instrumental interludes that popped up more frequently on their next album Start Something. The second section of this album is the three track run in the middle of the album starting with Kobrakai, one of the best songs on the album, with viciously loud guitars over the chorus of "So tell me why it all revolves around you, And I know in time what I must do." This is followed by the most aggressive song on the album, The Handsome Life of Swing, which switches the formula and is straight up emo loud during the verses and it gets really calm during the choruses, with each chorus getting increasingly forlorn, the angst in Watkins's voice eventually breaking down to a sweeping cry of "Yes, in time, won't be here to stay, King for a day, that's all i say, But here, thought i got a home, got a home." The last song of the second section is A Thousand Apologies, which starts off with a manic guitar riff and keeps spinning out of control for the length of the song until Watkins has a vocal moment of insanity, with the guitars swirling around as he screams "Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's very wrong, Please can I have more time?" The final section of the album contains the last four tracks, the first and last of which trend more towards the more radio friendly sound they would move towards later in their career, while the middle two fit more in with the noise of the first half of the album. Still Laughing is a gentle tale of love with Watkins singing "Know that I'll be there, Cause i can see it in your eyes, Time stood still for me, When you call" while the album closes with Ode to Summer, a fairly vanilla entry compared to the rest of the album. The two middle tracks are still loud, For Sure is about being frustrated with the constant fighting and eventually just bailing out. Awkward is the last banger of the album, opening with a super fast duo of skittering drums and finger flicking guitar. This album has been with me for a long time, it was the soundtrack to my dogwalk after the Bartman game, it's stuck with me through adolescence into young adulthood, and it looks like it's here to stay.

Song: Five is a Four Letter Word

​​01. J Dilla - Donuts

Year of Release: 2006

Sometime during my junior year at Illinois, I was reading a review on AllMusic of an album by Yesterday's New Quintet that I liked a couple of songs on. All of the material that Madlib did under that alias was instrumental-jazz-hip-hop, so I was surfing the "Related Albums" page of that review and I came across this album. What I found when I listened was an album composed completely of samples, broken up into thirty-one tracks, each less than two minutes (with the exception of the second track Workinonit which is almost three minutes long), and a wall of sound that would produce pleasurable relistenability (inventing that word) for the rest of my life. I can't really describe this album the way that I did the others, I can't go track by track and give you little snippets of each because there are thirty-one different tracks, so instead, let me tell you the story of this album's creation. J Dilla was a prolific rap producer and known vinyl rat: he collected everything. As a performer, he matched up with Madlib to make an album under the moniker JayLib, and released one solo rap album as Jay Dee. The year before this album came out, J Dilla spent most of the summer in the hospital (he had both lupus and the blood disease TTP). Feeling his mortality, and knowing that his time was short, J Dilla spent that time in the hospital creating this album as his final musical statement, a combination of all of his favorite samples and beats into one big opus, something to hang his hat on before he died. And die he did, he passed away three days after this album came out, it was released on his 32nd birthday, but the album only has thirty one tracks because Jay didn't think he was going to make it to 32. Everything on Donuts is mixed together from samples from his massive record collection, and the samples range from being so small you have no idea where it's from (95% of the samples are like that) but occasionally you'll hear something familiar, like the Beastie Boys vocal that opens The New or Stevie Wonder singing "Long before I knew, Oh someone warm like you" on The Twister (Huh, What) or Frank Zappa stating "He wants to get his girlfriend, go get your girlfriend" on Mash. There are hyper moments that stress your listening ability like on Glazed, which consists solely of the same trumpet note played over and over again with a looping bassline for a minute and a half. And there're soft moments like the soul singer on Stop! singing, "You're gonna want me back in your arms, you're gonna need me, one day, you gonna want me back, you better stop and think about what you're doing" over a piano sample. Dilla touches on all kinds of genres as well, taking steps into country on Anti-American Graffiti, he moves into an electric lullaby on Lightworks "The name of the game....is Lightworks," and even super sped up disco on Two Can Win. But most of Donuts sits in the soul meets hip hop genre, and it is unimpeachable as the greatest beats tape of all time. Dilla even finds time on this album to tell everyone he knows how much he loves them and will miss them on U-Luv with the line "Just because I really love you" and hopes his family won't suffer too much at his passing on Don't Cry. The influence of J Dilla on rap is immeasurable, go look at the Legacy section of his Wikipedia page, it's a who's who of people who have dedicated entire albums to him, or have tried to master his production technique as a tribute, or have sampled his beats. If there was no J Dilla, there wouldn't be a Kanye West, Dave Chappelle has used Dilla beats on his show and as the theme for his two comedy specials that were released this year on Netflix. But even more than all that, J Dilla has created an album that not only can I listen to on repeat, but if aliens came to Earth and said, "We are going to destroy all recorded music except one album, please pick one album for us to spare," Donuts is the only album I can even think of that wouldn't make me want to give up on music altogether. I could definitely handle listening to this album as the only music for the rest of my life. It's that good. RIP J Dilla, I will cherish your final piece of work for the rest of my life.

Song: Don't Cry

Wow, I can't believe it's actually over. I have written about (and listened to) three hundred different albums over the last six months. It's been a lot of words and a lot of man hours, so I hope y'all got some enjoyment out of it, and if anything, go out there and listen to some music!

#TheBeatles #Radiohead #Deftones #Gorillaz #Spoon #NoDoubt #Dada #Lostprophets #JDilla #Music