Reviews by anoriginalcliche

the thing about being a conscious rapper is you'll get ecstatic five-star reivews from the british press and be shortlisted for every prize and then six years later your biggest contribution to culture is a guest spot on a late-stage koombaya coldplay song

So influential it’s a struggle to hear this with fresh ears, but if you want to try, focus on how intimate this sounds, even with a nine-piece band, and then you’ll start to hear the unique brilliance that’s still potent in these tracks, and why it still stands on its on feet even compared to where these artists grew from here.

Grunge’s greatest fuck you.

Its reassessment is a fuck you to the haters, but regardless of where the consensus has now landed, the work itself is a fuck you to a lot of things: a misogynistic culture, to her peers and her riot grrrl feminist contemporaries, to herself and her own failings, to her marriage, to the world itself.

Courtney has far more to say than any of her peers, and i think she’s the one that got kurt to be more direct in his own lyrics.

But it’s complex and informed without being too pretentious — she’s literate in a way that normal people really aren’t anymore.

She’s a hugely flawed person and her own ambition led to her outsized celebrity which led to the backlash, but we more easily recognise the artistry of male artists in that predicament, and it clearly exists in spades here.

A blown vein of emotion, no wonder everyone thinks it's autobiographical

After this dropped everyone had to stop going electric and switch to acoustic guitars because they knew they could never compete

After this dropped everyone had to sell their dulcimers and switch to acoustic guitars because they knew they could never compete

For all these inspired Kanye beats, I can’t really get past common himself here, who seems to be trying to make the Bush era To Pimp a Butterfly (derogatory) and the best writing he can do amounts to stuff like: “So many raps about rims I’m surprised fellas ain’t become tyres!”

The faces as a band were better than this rating suggests, they just weren’t reflected well through their album output. I really like several of these songs but they’re weaker in this context, but come alive for me on the five guys walk into a bar box set, which sadly didn’t make it to the streaming era.

Lou’s voice is such a powerful thing. He’s a great writer when he wants to be, but even if he’s singing the most mundane pop lyrics his delivery can imbue them with layers of meaning — menace, detachment, ennui — that make them feel profound or affecting. Oft imitated never bested.

Perverse, reference laden, narratively oblique, full of words that don’t mean nothin, like luptid? Welcome back, James Joyce.

I was going to give this a 3 because Back to Life is a stellar groove but the proper version isn’t even in the actual album and without it this is fine, unremarkable, the kind of pleasant slightly innovative in context product of its time I’m fine forgetting where we left it

Too unpretentious to demand respect but deserves more of it than most we give out

She’s only transcendent at a bossa nova tempo for me but I like her enough to 4 the record where she does marching band music and duets with a small child too I guess

Gesamtkunstwerk

Timbaland and the Neptunes do such inspired work here that it made this dude seem cool for like a decade and a half.

One all timer here, the rest throwaway. Also, isn’t it kind of crazy that when Papa John Philips’s daughter wrote in her 2009 memoir that her dad had groomed her into a ten year physical relationship, the media reported it as a tawdry but consensual affair? I guess Monday, Monday is pretty good too, but I prefer Neil Diamond’s cover.

Some of the best songs ever written and also some songs where he imagines calling the president to tell him what European actresses he wants to fuck. Flawless.

Shut up and sing, Tom.

It started with S&G, but what I love about Simon you can really start to hear here. Yes, he’s an inspired songwriter and evocative lyricist, but he always seems to feel claustrophobic within his own aesthetic — always pushing the boundaries and pulling from disparate genres and cultures — and it’s that tension within himself and within his music that stopped him from becoming another static singer songwriter type, and often elevates the material, and at the very least provides enough contrast so that he’s never boring. Plus, he’s funny.

John Frusciante coming into his own is really what elevates this material, and both Flea and Chad Smith are incredible musicians. But I don't connect with the the Kiedis scat-rap antics, songwriting and early funk dna like I did growing up. That made the majority of this album more grating and skippable than I was expecting upon revisit, so can't give this a great score. But it's not a 3 of mediocrity, it's a 3 of high highs and low lows.