There were two more rules that I hadn’t included in the round up before. They were: One, live albums count, as long as they’re really consistently good albums, and two, EP’s are just shorter albums, because who gives a fuck about designations like that? With that out of the way, the list for today:

80. Who’s Got the 10 1/2, Black Flag (1986)

When I was twenty-three and had just quit my job to write full-time, I used to listen to this album every night. I had a cassette copy I had stolen from Half-Price Books – it was only fifty cents, but I was being punk rock – and I would put it in this old boombox and flip it from side to side, going through the whole thing for many hours. I wrote a novel that way. There are better Black Flag albums, but none that feel more real to me.

79. The Great Divide, Semisonic (1996)

I knew we’d see more 90’s alternative rock creep up on the list. Semisonic’s first album is fucking incredible, the sort of songwriting and arrangements that make you wonder if the label didn’t tell Dan Wilson to dumb it down for Feeling Strangely Fine. It’s just impossibly catchy, smart, and a blueprint for a ton of indie pop/rock bands who followed.

78. New Amerykah Part One: 4thWorld War, Erykah Badu (2008)

I really don’t think she’s peaked yet, but she keeps getting better and better. And when you start with Baduizm, that’s really impressive. I love how subdued this album is, except when it’s not. I love how she doesn’t let her voice overpower the song, except when she does. She seems 100% in control throughout, and at the height of her abilities.

77. Down the River of Broken Dreams, Okkervil River (2003)

Down the River of Broken Dreams was a slow-burn for me. I was introduced to this band by some girl when I was a volunteer at SXSW 2002 and she asked me to hear Don’t Fall In Love With Everybody You Meet at the listening booth. I had a crush on her, she was busy and walked away after about thirty seconds, unimpressed, and I blamed the band. Sorry, dudes. I saw them a few more times before I really got this band, but the song “The War Criminal Rises and Speaks” (for which no decent YouTube video exists) just continued to resonate with me, and the more I listened to the whole album, the more I realized that it was just an incredibly powerful artistic and literary statement. The distressed vocals stopped bothering me much, and I really started to understand what was so impressive about them. I’m glad they’re famous now.

76. Blue Collar, Rhymefest (2006)

I love everything about this album. Especially the fact that Rhymefest is one of the most intense and self-aware MC’s on the planet, but he’s totally unashamed to show off his silly side.

75. The Beginning Stages of…, The Polyphonic Spree (2002)

I’ve written a zillion words about this band and this album, but what’re a few more? That novel I mentioned in the Who’s Got the 10 1/2 section up there? It was about a dude who was as obsessed with this album – and “Soldier Girl”, in particular – as much as I had been in 2002 and 2003. Sometimes the right music finds you at the right time, and this one was it for me. It was actually kinda weird for me to rank them in the 70’s, instead of way higher, but the time when they were right has mostly passed now. I still love this band, but it’s kind of an old love now, more nostalgic than vibrant. 75’s about right.

74. If I Could Only Fly, Merle Haggard (2000)

I just decided to get into country music when this album came out (it was a decision) and I grabbed this, along with another half-dozen that week. It kinda went over my head at the time, because it’s packed with so many references to his career, his life, and his body of work, but now that I have more context for it, I can understand why that makes If I Could Only Fly so great.

73. 12 Songs, Neil Diamond (2005)

I don’t really see how anyone else could have a different Neil Diamond record on a list like this, because he’s had such a weird body of work, and it dates back before the album was an exclusive format. “Sweet Caroline” was just a single, you know? But that’s not the point – the point is that, even if “Hell Yeah”, “Delirious Love”, the other ten songs on this album were the only great songs Neil Diamond ever wrote, he’d still deserve his legend. The fact that they’re among several hundred (seriously, google it) just makes it even more impressive.

72. Amazing Grace, Spiritualized (2003)

A trend I’m noticing – 2003 was a benchmark year for me, in terms of how into music I was. Which makes sense, really – it’s around the age that people stop listening to new music, so it may have been a sort-of last hurrah. I went to shows at least two or three times a week, and I could hear an album like Amazing Grace and have a new favorite record that would live alongside the other greats in the pantheon from that moment on. What’s interesting to me is that they’ve mostly stayed there.

71. The Unauthorized Biography of Reinhold Messner, Ben Folds Five (1999)

But 1999 was a good year, too. Reinhold Messner kinda disappointed me at first, because it doesn’t sound much like Whatever and Ever Amen, which was very much the soundtrack to my senior year of high school. It started to stick for me after a few months, though, when I realized the reason I was disappointed was that it was such a leap in songwriting and production. I wasn’t in high school anymore, and it was good to learn that my favorite music would grow up with me.

70. Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home, The Geraldine Fibbers (1995)

Missed the boat on this one – I didn’t discover them until 2003, and they were long gone by then. Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home is the exact sort of 90’s alt-rock album that I still love, where it’s a little bit mean and crazy and intense, more like the Screaming Trees or Afghan Whigs than Buffalo Tom or Pearl Jam. Carla Bozulich is crazier now than ever, but if you love her as Evangelista, you can see that, even when she was younger, she was no less insane.

69. The Fragile, Nine Inch Nails (1999)

I wouldn’t have guessed, when this album came out, that it’d be the only Nine Inch Nails album I’d put on a list years later, but it is. I think it’s partly that 1999 was obviously another benchmark year, but also that there are a lot of dynamics here that are missing on other Nine Inch Nails albums. It’s soft and sincere where The Downward Spiral is blustery, and its louds and angrys are authentic where the stuff that came before – and some of what came after – comes off as inauthentic. He got good again a few years ago, but I don’t think he’s been this good since.

68. Pinups, Human Drama (1992)

I was kinda a half-assed goth kid for a couple years in high school, and most of what I listened to was pretty bad. Not Human Drama, though. Pinups is their Bowie homage, and while the vocals are kinda hard to take seriously, the covers on here were my first introduction to a lot of people who I still listen to a lot today – Tom Waits, The Kinks, Lou Reed, John Lennon-as-solo-artist – and these versions hold up really well. 

67. Unchained, Johnny Cash (1996)

66. Songs in the Key of Life, Stevie Wonder (1976)

My roommate in San Antonio listened to this album constantly, and it took me a little while to get it, mostly because “Have a Talk With God” comes early on, and I’m not big on god songs. That’s silly, though. There’s an old Vonnegut quote – or a quote that’s attributed to him, at least – where he’s supposed to have said, “The only proof needed of god is the existence of music”, or something to that effect. And, you know, if faith in the big guy is what it takes to make records like Songs in the Key of Life, it can’t be that bad.

65. Wake Up Son, Annie Palmer (2006)

Annie’s a friend of mine, but I haven’t seen her in ages. I still have Wake Up Son, though, which is a five-track CD she recorded a few years ago. There are a lot of people I’ve played shows with and been friends with whose music appealed to me, or who I had fun watching live, but whose songs never worked outside of the context of who they were and how I met them. Annie’s not one of them. Wake Up Son is an airtight collection of early songs by a really amazing voice. I wish she’d record a full album, but that’s not the sort of complaint that really sounds like a complaint, if you know what I mean. Any life you live that means you can make friends with such talented people is one to be proud of, I think.

64. Stankonia, OutKast (1999)

I decided that I loved Stankonia before I even heard it, because I didn’t really get Aquemeni, but I loved what OutKast were about. When I read the reviews about how this album was full of rock guitars and strange new shit you’ve never heard before, I was on board. And then – fuck, man, you’ve heard it. They deliver. Totally exceeded expectations. It’s so great that they got huge off of this record.

63. Taking the Long Way, The Dixie Chicks (2006)

I don’t want to hear it, okay? I remember driving around Tennessee and the Southeast shortly after this record came out while I was on tour by myself, and there was no one to judge me, so I just listened to it over and over again. I know all the words to “Taking the Long Way Around”, sure, and “Not Ready to Make Nice” and “Lubbock and Leave It” and the ballads, too, okay? It’s just such a defiant statement. I love that they were exiled from country music, waited a few years for the nation to cool down, and then released a record to say, “Fuck you, still not what you want us to be”. Total badasses. No punk band ever flipped off their audience this hard.

62. Unplugged, Jay-Z (2001)

When this came out, the underground hadn’t flipped around yet and started to love people like Jay-Z the way they do now. Smart hip-hop was still a niche market, and so most of the people I knew who were into hip-hop resented Jay for selling records that weren’t being sold by, like, Murs or whoever. And then I’d play them this, and they’d shut the fuck up.

61. OK Computer, Radiohead (1997)

I know, dudes, I’m shocked that OK Computer is so far down on the list, too, but this shit was scientifically determined, and I couldn’t bump anything else to fit it earlier. But it also kind of makes sense, because I never listen to it anymore. It’s one of those that’s kinda redundant to listen to, given how much I played it from 1997-2000 or so, and they have so much other work out there that I haven’t totally stripmined that there’s no reason to really revisit OK Computer. It’s great, yeah, but it’s not now great. It’s just an album I used to love.