Filtering by Tag: The 100
The 100: Deftones, AROUND THE FUR
When I first started buying music, it was on cassette tapes.
Read MoreThe 100: Nightmares on Wax, SMOKERS DELIGHT
My relationship to electronic music has always been mercurial. My first real experiences with it likely came during the ‘90s Euro-pop boom on mainstream radio—the big tent voice-based house and techno jams like Real McCoy’s “Another Night,” Corona’s “The Rhythm of the Night” and La Bouche’s “Be My Lover,” alongside the rise of Ace of Base. I didn’t like most of that stuff at the time, though I have a lot of nostalgia wrapped up in some of that stuff (I’ll always ride for Gina G’s “Ooh Aah…Just a Little Bit”)
Read MoreThe 100: David Bowie, LOW
I’m not sure when I heard David Bowie for the first time. I imagine I heard “Space Oddity,” which was one of those songs that was always in the air, floating through radio airspace and embedding itself in the carpet even if you weren’t going out of your way to find it. I also have a clear memory of seeing Tin Machine perform on an old episode of Saturday Night Live hosted by Macaulay Culkin. (Like the rest of the universe, I was unimpressed.) I was aware of Bowie and what a towering figure he was, and I had seen him on screen in Labyrinth and The Last Temptation of Christ, but if I’m being perfectly honest the first time I really engaged with David Bowie was when he was interviewed next to Trent Reznor on MTV.
Read MoreThe 100: Ramones, TOO TOUGH TO DIE
I’m always making lists, and last year I put together a compendium of my 100 favorite albums of all time. The only hard and fast criterion followed was that at some point in my life I had to have considered each record on the list to be my absolute favorite at that time. My long list was way longer than 100 but I managed to whittle it down to a representative rundown. It’s a living document (I’ve swapped out a handful of titles since the initial drafting), but the bulk of the entries feel pretty permanent. I didn’t bother to rank them (for sorting purposes, it was easier to leave the list in alphabetical order) so I tossed the whole list into a random generator and will endeavor to break down each individual entry in this space.
Let’s begin with the Ramones, whose first four full-length releases (1976’s Ramones, 1977’s Leave Home and Rocket to Russia and 1978’s Road to Ruin) are all bulletproof compendiums of raw punk energy and deceptively sweet songcraft. So why do I gravitate toward a far more uneven release from the Ramones’ tumultuous 1980s?
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