music reviews

Car Wheels on a Gravel Road, Lucinda Williams (1998)

Home is an idea, a mythical place of unconditional love and unquestioned belonging. It’s also a real place filled with what’s most familiar to us—that is, the things we find most beautiful and most appalling in this wide world. The brilliance of Car Wheels on a Gravel Road is that Williams doesn’t offer resolution. She just thoroughly marinates us in the details of home, perhaps hoping that we have what it takes to sort out the mess inside us. There’s great love here (“june bug versus hurricane”) and great condemnation (“I used to think you were strong”) and also great and honest ambivalence (“little bit of dirt mixed with tears”). There are tens of thousands of albums about heartbreak. Car Wheels is about how heartbreak feels when one has the wisdom to look around and see that a landscape surrounds the heart. 11 ↑ ↓

Lucinda Williams. Car Wheels on a Gravel Road. Mercury, 1998. Reviewed October 14, 2025. Notable tracks: “2 Kool 2 Be 4-Forgotten,” “Car Wheels on a Gravel Road,” “Greenville,” “Jackson,” “Concrete and Barbed Wire, “I Lost It.”

Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco (2002)

Every listener has their biases. I’ve just never really quite connected to 21st-century indie rock, whatever that label means. I’ve been trying and mostly failing to appreciate Arcade Fire, Grizzly Bear (or is it Panda Bear?), Vampire Weekend, etc. for two decades—these bands move many, many people, and so there must be something there, but my mind can’t get to it. Maybe Wilco is a gateway drug. The indecipherable lyrics and fuzzy pop melodies are indie to the bone, but Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has just enough country, just enough politics, just enough folky soul, to break through my prejudices. I don’t hear this as one of the greatest albums of all time, as some of my friends do, but with every listen I understand more clearly what Wilco is getting at. Heartbreak, personal and social, is a mess, but it can be a lovely mess. Hence catchy tunes obscured by distortion, the occasional glimmers of bluntness (“I wonder why we listen to poets when nobody gives a fuck”) surrounded by a word-haze felt and sung without need for comprehension, even by the singer (“I am an American aquarium drinker/I assassin down the avenue”). Got it, and Radiohead’s got next. 8 ↑ ↓

Wilco. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Nonesuch, 2002. Reviewed August 30, 2025. Notable tracks: “Ashes of American Flags,” “I am Trying to Break Your Heart,” “Kamera,” “Jesus, Etc.”

Rising Down, The Roots (2008)

There are no label-friendly singles on this album, no Do You Want More?-style heady jazz, none of the late 90s neo-soul vibe. The mood of Roots albums had been growing steadily darker over the years, and Rising Down is the apotheosis of grime. That’s a good thing. It’s not easy to grab listeners with an emotion and not let go. It’s even more difficult when the emotion is a complex combination of frustration-on-the-edge-of-explosion, a refusal to surrender, vindication, proud witnessing. That all this is evoked not only or even primarily by the lyrics, but rather by the darkly electric musical arrangements, is remarkable. Clearly nobody told these guys that the album, let alone the concept album, is dead. Still, I wonder about what Rising Down could have been if the hooks were a little tighter—a perpetual Roots weakness—and if more of the record were given over to Black Thought at his peak instead of the Philly guest performer crew, as brilliant as some of their verses are. (Mos Def’s album-opening lines are among the hottest in the annals of hip-hop: “Blindin’ staring at lights till they cryin’/Bone gristle popping from continuous grindin’/Grapes of wrath in a shapely glass/Ingredients influential on your ways and acts”…come on). Ah well. As the 2024 election reminds us, the need for honest grime will be with us for some time yet, maybe centuries. It’s all on wax, MAGA, more and more every day. Too much to ban or burn. 7 ↑ ↓

The Roots. Rising Down. Def Jam, 2008. Reviewed August 28, 2025. Notable tracks: “Rising Down,” “Get Busy,” “75 Bars (Black’s Reconstruction).”

Amassakoul, Tinariwen (2004)

These dudes are the real deal. The members of Tinariwen met and learned to play music in refugee camps. Ibrahim Ag Alhabib’s first guitar was made of a gas can, a stick, and a bicycle brake line. The band reportedly has seventeen bullet wounds between them. Tinariwen’s astonishing music is rooted in the hope and suffering of rebellion—they are Tuareg, a stateless people from northern Mali and southern Algeria—and even more so in feeling of the desert, expansive, merciless, beautiful: “I can stand the wind/I can stand the thirst…These worries are my friends/I’m always on familiar terms with them and that/
Gives birth to the stories of my life,” Ag Alhabib sings on the first track, the propulsive, hypnotic “Amassakoul ‘n’ténéré.” Traditional north African music, the blues, rock n’ roll—Tinariwen’s sound contains it all, but there’s something else here, a depth of soul that few bands in the world possess. It’s like nothing I’ve heard before, and it also sounds like home. 10 ↑ ↓

Tinariwen. Amassakoul. World Village, 2004. Reviewed August 28, 2025. Notable tracks: “Amassakoul ‘n’ténéré,” “Oualahila Ar Teninam,” “Arawan.”

Against the Grain, Bad Religion (1990)

Each of Bad Religion’s albums conveys a different shade of world-weary righteousness. Disgust is probably the dominating emotion of Against the Grain—disgust at growing ecological disaster, our numbing addiction to consumption, the rise of retrograde evangelism. It’s as if the band simply can’t believe that natural selection produced such an idiotic organism. And yet the album is kind of…fun. No one does soaring punk melodies like these dudes, and there’s something of a wink in their anger, as if they really do believe that a mosh pit and a thesaurus can turn this shit around. Suffer still stands as their best album, but the seven-song stretch between “Anesthesia” and “21st Century Digital Boy” (excepting the title track) may be Bad Religion’s artistic peak. “Don’t speak to me of anarchy or peace or calm revolt, man/You’re in a play of slow decay orchestrated by Boltzmann”? That’s fine art if I’ve ever heard it. 10 ↑ ↓

Bad Religion. Against the Grain. Epitaph, 1990. Reviewed August 18, 2025. Notable tracks: “Entropy,” “21st Century Digital Boy,” “Faith Alone.”

Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, and Sitars, Kalyanji-Anandji & Dan the Automator (1998)

The brothers Kalyanji and Anandji Shah composed hundreds of Bollywood soundtracks over their career, mostly for masala action flicks. Bombay the Hard Way is a collection of their 1970s funk-heavy work, curated, produced, and remixed by San Francisco legend Dan the Automator. It’s not an earth-shaking album, but good enough to generate curious smiles and get some heads bobbing at a Sunday barbecue. I’m not sure how exactly Dan changed the original tracks—the liner notes are scanty—but I feel a Bay breeze blowing through the hard Bombay beats. Or maybe music made near bays just has a common vibe. Whatever; the one rule of masala movies is to not think too hard. Pass the pav bhaji and let’s get down. 7 ↑ ↓

Kalyanji-Anandji and Dan the Automator. Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, and Sitars. Motel, 1998. Reviewed August 14, 2025. Notable tracks: “Theme from Don,” “My Guru,” “Bombay 405 Miles,” “Satchidananda.”

Dimanche à Bamako, Amadou & Mariam (2005)

Amadou Bagayoko and Mariam Doumbia met at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind in the late 1970s, and for the next couple decades made music in relative obscurity. Near the turn of the century, they began overlaying Malian traditional music with blues and rock styles, utilizing a dizzying array of instruments—balafon, calebasse, djembe, trumpet, harmonica, tabla, violin…the list goes on and on. Dimanche à Bamako was their first popular success. The album is remarkable, a brew of infectious joy, pleas for justice, and—most of all—longing for beautiful and simple things. Taxi rides, a Sunday wedding, peace, just peace. Amadou Bagayoko died a few months ago. It’s a great loss for us. In a world where fame perfectly reflected talent, which is not our world, Amadou and Mariam would be known as among the most gifted, original, and necessary of artists. If one day they are remembered as such, it will be in part because their music helped create that world. 11 ↑ ↓

Amadou & Mariam. Dimanche à Bamako. Because Music, 2005. Reviewed July 23, 2025. Notable tracks: “Politic Amagni,” “La Réalité,” “Beaux Dimanches,” “M’bifé,” “Sénégal Fast Food.”

Visions of the Country, Robbie Basho (1978)

Robbie Basho’s guitar is astonishing. Basho immersed himself deeply in various musical traditions—Indian, Persian, Native American, among others—but cultural syncretism only works when it results in something truly original. Basho’s sound is. The songs contain shadows of ragas, scales born far from the Wyoming high plateau, chants in a Native cadence; but in the end the music in Visions is, in any meaningful sense, only Robbie Basho. It’s also true that Basho’s vocals are at best an acquired taste. His singing is sometimes hypnotic, pious, and sometimes carefree, undisciplined. Maybe he wanted to emphasize that these sets of emotions are not at odds. That idea works only occasionally (“Orphan’s Lament”), but I’m quibbling. Robbie Basho’s life was tragic, and perhaps Visions is best described as one long miserere, a plea for mercy to the wide open sky. 8 ↑ ↓

Robbie Basho. Visions of the Country. Windham Hill, 1978. Reviewed July 9, 2025. Notable tracks: “Orphan’s Lament,” “Rodeo,” “Elk Dreamer’s Lament.”

The BQE, Sufjan Stevens (2007)

The ambition of Sufjan Stevens! How many composers would attempt a symphony about an expressway? Much less pull it off—BQE is musically varied, hilarious, sometimes stirring, and ultimately joyous. I admit that if I didn’t know the concept and intention of the project, the music wouldn’t hit as deeply as it does. But the cover design, liner notes, and song titles are all part of the art. Surrounded by such signifiers, the music’s evocations are inevitable: traffic snarls, the grand skyline of NYC, midnight quiet, corruption buried under the asphalt. The Brooklyn-Queens Expressway makes no one’s list of great public works. It’s just this fact, the American ordinariness of the BQE, its excess and ugliness and bland functionality, that makes the road such a great artistic subject. Maybe things appear banal because the virtue and debasement they’re made of neutralize each other. Stevens’s great achievement is to recover these ingredients and rearrange them in just such a way as to reveal the magic of it all. 9 ↑ ↓

Sufjan Stevens. The BQE. Asthmatic Kitty, 2007. Reviewed June 21, 2025. Notable tracks: “Movement IV—Traffic Shock,” “Movement III—Linear Tableau with Intersecting Surprise,” “Movement VII (Finale)—The Emperor of Centrifuge.”

Troubadour, K’naan (2009)

K’naan hasn’t released an album in thirteen years, and that’s only if we’re counting 2012’s mediocre Country, God or the Girl. But the Somalian-Canadian MC’s first two albums, The Dusty Foot Philosopher and Troubadour, had the potential to take mainstream hip-hop into thrilling, borderless territory. K’naan’s art has an emotional center: his experience of fleeing war-torn early 1990s Somalia for North America, and his consequent urge to put Al Capone poseurs in their place. Sometimes he does this directly (“I walk rappers through the killa hoods any day/They never been opposite real goons anyway”), but he’s far more effective, and original, when he pens stories that are somehow both universal and strongly evocative of place, his place, his homes. No track does this more powerfully than “Fatima,” a lament about a first love taken away by soldiers. The universal experience is of lost love; the particular horror is of children caught in war. Overall, however, the album is admittedly uneven. K’naan stumbles when he strays from his own voice, which happens most obviously when guest stars come on board. Surely Kirk Hammett and Adam Levine were unnecessary. Still, Troubadour is worth keeping near. There will be times when only this angle of the world will do. 7 ↑ ↓

K’naan. Troubadour. A&M/Octone, 1999. Reviewed June 6, 2025. Notable tracks: “Fatima,” “Wavin’ Flag,” “Fire in Freetown,” “People Like Me.”

Viva Tu, Manu Chao (2024)

With the release of Clandestino in 1998, Manu Chao created a new sound, an original fusion in senses musical (reggae, punk, folk, blues), linguistic (Spanish, French, English, Portuguese, Catalan, Arabic), and thematic (justice, heartbreak, joy). “Fusion” in the best sense of that word—not a forced meeting, but a revelation of threads that connect what superficially seems separate. Ska upstrokes riding on rumba beats; Portuñol in the mist of the Brazilian borderlands; broken-hearted laments and prayers of gratitude, indistinguishable. Viva Tu is not a new album. It’s a continuation of the revolutionary human solidarity project that began with Mano Negra and continued with Clandestino, Próxima Estación: Esperanza, and La Radiolina. Manu Chao will be criticized for recycling beats and melodies, and for writing songs that read like lists. Such critiques miss the point. This is all one novel, one symphony, and there are passages—”Tantas tierras en el mundo/Tantos mares por nacer…Todo el mundo sin saber/La que algún dia va caer”—when the magic of a planet brimming with music becomes evident. 9 ↑ ↓

Manu Chao. Viva Tu. Because, 2024. Reviewed May 23, 2025. Notable tracks: “Tantas Tierras,” “Vecinos en el Mar,” “Tu Te Vas,” “La Couleur du Temps.”

Gracious Mama Africa, Dezarie (2001)

Dezarie has all the qualities that give reggae global appeal: soul-stirring basslines, sweet melodies, bracingly honest lyrics. But she’s also got something unique that defies adjective. Consider, from “Poverty,” sung over an achingly lovely tune: “…them raise certain price despite/Just so black youth them can’t enjoy/So in return all them want do is fight/Poverty a blow the youths, them mind.” Transforming weariness into clear-eyed conviction into song is not so easy. If all music were just this true, the record execs would be broke and the mountains would indeed be made of big rock candy. We’ll get there. In the meantime, lean back and listen to a sister that won’t let you lie to yourself, or anyone else. 9 ↑ ↓

Dezarie. Gracious Mama Africa. Afrikan Roots Lab, 2003. Reviewed May 15, 2025. Notable tracks: “Poverty,” “Gone Down,” “Judgement Come,” “Not One Penny.”

Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space), Digable Planets (1993)

In high school, riding around town with my friends, I remember being slightly embarrassed putting Reachin’ in the tape deck and hitting play. These cats were for sure weird—were they also corny? Was I corny? Thirty years later, Digable Planets’ debut album sounds like it came from the future. The metaphysics I once thought bohemian-cute feel deeper than ever—turns out time and space are definitely not what we think they are!—the politics are on point and badly needed, and the jazz grooves mesh brilliantly with the Fort Greene beats. It was always this way. Whatever insecurities we had, we kept hitting play, again and again. Butterfly, Cee Knowledge, and Ladybug came to Planet Earth to resurrect the funk. Their mission is incomplete, but that’s on us. 9 ↑ ↓

Digable Planets. Reachin’ (A New Refutation of Time and Space). Elektra, 2016. Reviewed October 19, 2024. Notable tracks: “Pacifics,” “La Femme Fatal,” “Rebirth of Slick (Cool Like Dat).”

American Band, Drive-By Truckers (2016)

Honest political art walks the line between ambiguity and conviction. Sloganeering, no matter how righteous the fight, eventually ends in middle-aged exhaustion. This is especially the case when a tribe is the cause. No song better exemplifies the success of American Band than “Ever South,” an odd mix of (Irish-)European pride and settler confessional. The point is that none of our ancestors were unequivocal heroes and few were irremediable villains. The immigrants didn’t know what the hell they were doing when they scrambled onto ships—or what the hell was happening when they were forced onto ships—and they built homes and dispossessed the homes of others and fled from self-loathing and learned to hate and articulated stories to rationalize it all. America is what arises out of all this interminable stumbling. No wonder it’s so hard to figure out how to save ourselves. Bearing witness is a good start. 8 ↑ ↓

Drive-By Truckers. American Band. ATO Records, 2016. Reviewed October 19, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ever South,” “What It Means,” “Ramon Casiano,” “Once They Banned Imagine.”

I Have No Everything Here, Zomba Prison Project (2015)

Women prisoners dancing and singing inside the Zomba Prison

Dostoevsky wrote in House of the Dead that the character of a society can be judged by entering its prisons. It would not be fair to lay the horrors of Zomba Central Prison—overcrowding, malnutrition, HIV—on Malawian society: it’s one of the poorest countries in the world, and the gap in well-being between free people and prisoners is probably narrower in Malawi than in most other countries. But maybe we can revise Dostoevsky and say that the hope of a society can be judged by the character of its prisoners. The inmates of Zomba make music. Masterful, heart-wrenching music. Music about death, sin, fatigue, longing, forgiveness. Their musical virtuosity should not be mistaken for personal virtue. Some of the singers have done terrible things (and others have done nothing save being born poor). But it’s hard to hear their songs and not believe, like we all did when we were children, that no one is beyond redemption, and that there is something akin to character, to morality, within a melody. Some of us are good people, and some of us are good songs. Who is willing to judge that one is worth less than the other? 10 ↑ ↓

Zomba Prison Project. I Have No Everything Here. Six Degrees Records, 2015. Reviewed October 12, 2024. Notable tracks: “Listen to Me (Or I Will Kick Your Ass),” “Please Don’t Kill My Child,” “I See the Whole World Dying of AIDS,” “Forgiveness.”

Ola Wave, Zane Campbell (2017)

Zane Campbell is the real deal. A royal Appalachian music bloodline, a life torn apart by drink and drugs, undeniable lyrical genius, a refusal to conform to country-music-as-beer-commercial. What does it all amount to? Maybe nothing more sitting on a torn recliner in the yard with a scruffy guitar in hand, singing your heart out to the leafless trees. It’s likely that the universe has no center and that no one’s judgment of success or failure, of a life well-lived or wasted, matters. Still, notes ring out and the leaves rustle. Music is a physical thing, and what’s physical is indestructible, changing forms but never fully divested of its previous content, traveling and traveling. Zane Campbell and his scribbles and his deep tremolo are made of Aunt Ola Wave, her own forgotten ancestors, and his real deal life. And maybe the future too. 9 ↑ ↓

Campbell, Zane. Ola Wave. Emperor Records, 2017. Reviewed October 6, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ola Wave,” “A Way Around It,” “Tear Down the Fences.”

Original Sufferhead, Fela Kuti (1981)

Few artists can credibly lay claim to inventing a genre. The one Fela Kuti created, Afrobeat, remains difficult to define. The word connotes musical influences (Nigerian traditional music, Ghanaian highlife, funk, soul), instrumentation (horn-heavy, percussion forward), and a musical ideology (energetic, experimental, political). All of this is a reflection of Fela’s time and place: a globalizing world in which music across oceans was available to be synthesized into local styles, and also a time of creeping despair in which Nigerians, and peoples all over the world, began to realize that they had traded brutal colonial regimes for elite corruption. But it takes genius to transform the currents of history into music that reveals and then redirects those currents. Original Sufferhead, released at the height of Fela’s fame as both musician and activist, is a blunt statement about what it feels like to have hands around your throat, every day, every hour. Water, light, food, house-y: all dissolved in the power show. And yet these tracks will far outlive the memory of the generals that tried to suppress them. 8 ↑ ↓

Kuti, Fela. Original Sufferhead. Knitting Factory Records, 1981. Reviewed October 6, 2024. Notable track: “Original Sufferhead.”

Rough and Rowdy Ways, Bob Dylan (2020)

All Bob ever wanted is for us to not forget the past. Not excuse its crimes or stop moving forward, but to simply remember what we once were, how we once felt. Every Dylan record since 1992’s Good as I Been to You serves this kind of conservatism—the best kind of conservatism, one interested in connections between past, present, and future instead of dreaming of a mythical golden age when everyone else was oppressed. Two albums of blues covers; the stunning traditionalist trilogyTime Out of Mind, “Love and Theft”, and Modern Times; the Robert Hunter collaboration Together Through Life; the probably-tongue-in-cheek Christmas album; the Sinatra standards. It’s all about what used to be. Rough and Rowdy Ways not only doesn’t hide its debt to the past, it flaunts it from beginning to end. The opening track, “I Contain Multitudes,” calls out literary giants like a sixth-grade poem, and it would sound like one too if Dylan’s voice were not so damn sincere. He really loves this stuff. The finale “Murder Most Foul,” a 17-minute recap of JFK’s assassination, is equally guileless, somehow managing to land just on the right side of hypnotic and utterly unnecessary. Other than a couple of undeniable gems (the devotional “Mother of Muses,” the grave-robber anthem “My Own Version of You”), this is not one of Dylan’s great albums, but it’s also better than mediocre. It’s perhaps most like Tempest, a record that manages to evoke nothing so much as uneasy waiting, fuzzy boundaries, posthumous art that mysteriously slipped into life. 7 ↑ ↓

Dylan, Bob. Rough and Rowdy Ways. Columbia, 2020. Reviewed September 28, 2024. Notable tracks: “My Own Version of You,” “Mother of Muses.””

Soul Journey, Gillian Welch (2003)

Critics generally regard Gillian Welch’s third album, Soul Journey, as an artistic lull. I disagree. The dominant themes of her other early albums—Revival‘s wistfulness, Hell Among the Yearlings‘ gothic grimness, even Time (the Revelator)‘s nostalgic cool—are more emotionally fundamental than the lightness of Soul Journey. But lightness can also be deep. It’s the sensation of arm hairs standing on end as a cool summer breeze hits, and the jumble of memories and dreams that leak in afterward. And lightness can also be deceptive: “Look at Miss Ohio” and “One Little Song” are as cutting as any song Welch has ever written, sweet melodies notwithstanding. There are a couple duds buried in the album’s center (“One Monkey” is not a good work of art, catchy or not, religious allegory or not), but Soul Journey is, twenty years later, an indispensable part of Welch’s oeuvre. 8 ↑ ↓

Welch, Gillian. Soul Journey. Acony, 2003. Reviewed September 13, 2024. Notable tracks: “Look at Miss Ohio,” “Wayside/Back in Time,” “Lowlands.”

Black on Both Sides, Mos Def (1999)

I hated my nose growing up. It was too big, too bulbous. I wanted a white nose: Roman, aquiline. The insecurity grew milder as I got older, but it wasn’t until I saw the album cover for Black on Both Sides, and then listened to the music, that I understood how thoroughly I’d been brainwashed. Yasiin Bey, the erstwhile Mos Def, is Black on all sides and at all elevations. His nose is not like mine, but it’s also not the ad exec’s Platonic ideal of a leading man’s nose. On the cover, Bey is expressionless, serene, his eyes reflecting light, and it’s all so very beautiful, beauty far beyond desire or admiration. The man is alive. What a remarkable thing that is! The music is a deepening of the portrait, a testament to self-love, love of a people, love of home, love of creation, love of music—and sprouting from all that love, demands for sanity and justice, all riding a tight, dexterous flow. Maybe it’s a shame that Bey released so little music over the years; 2009’s Ecstatic was his last album until 2022’s Black Star reunion (not counting the museum exhibit Negus). But maybe Bey was too sincere to do otherwise. Why keep talking when the whole of the message is there from the beginning? 10 ↑ ↓

Mos Def. Black on Both Sides. Rawkus/Priority, 1999. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “New World Water,” “Speed Law,” “Rock ‘N’ Roll,” “Know That.”

The Complete Plantation Recordings, Muddy Waters (1941)

In 1941, the music historian Alan Lomax traveled to Clarksdale, Mississippi, hoping to record the legendary Robert Johnson. Johnson was dead, but locals pointed Lomax to another blues guitarist, McKinley Morganfield, better known by his nickname Muddy Waters. Over the course of two visits in 1941 and 1942, Lomax and the musicologist John Work recorded Waters picking and singing on his porch on Stovall’s Plantation, where he’d worked as a sharecropper since he was a teenager. “Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that voice and it was my own voice,” Waters recalled years later, “I can do it.” And he did indeed do it. Muddy Waters is now known as one of the greatest bluesmen of all time, a key figure in restoring the music of the Delta to its rightful place at the heart of American music. The Complete Plantation Recordings is far from the polished, Chicago-fied Muddy Waters that lived on top of the R&B charts in the 1950s. The dust and pain of the Delta is here. And if Muddy’s music is not as quite as ruthless as Johnson’s, or as plaintive as Son House’s, or as gentle as Mississippi John Hurt’s, it carries an ineffable quality that’s just as essential to the blues. Clear-eyed kindness, perhaps, including towards oneself. We all got to take sick and die one of these days. There’s nothing for a wise man to do but throw himself into each and every flatted fifth. 9 ↑ ↓

Muddy Waters. The Complete Plantation Recordings. Chess, 1993. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “You Got to Take Sick and Die One of These Days,” “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone,” “Country Blues.”

RTJ4, Run the Jewels (2020)

RTJ4 dropped a week after George Floyd’s murder and a few months after COVID-19 started shutting down the world. In retrospect, the most painful legacy of 2020 isn’t the horrific impact of the events themselves. It’s the blinding realization that the world is just the same as it was before. No major legislation addressing police brutality passed; no overdue reckoning with racism—the policy normalization of reparations, say—happened. The global public health system hasn’t made the changes necessary to prevent or contain the next pandemic, although it’s very clear that an infectious disease far deadlier than COVID-19 will hit us in the next generation or two. If death—proximate death, the death of parents, the future death of hundreds of millions of indisputable innocents—doesn’t change us, what will? Killer Mike and El-P don’t have the answers, but damn it if they don’t have a method. Killer Mike surfs waves of bubbling rage and wit (“Not a holy man, but I’m moral in my perverseness / So I support the sex workers unionizing their services”), El-P’s vulnerability is remarkable (“‘Well, what a wretched state of danger we’ve made here,” I thought to me / Perhaps explaining years of self lobotomy, toxically / Perhaps explaining tears and even tears in my cosmology / You numb yourself for years and it can wear upon you, honestly”), and his jagged, smoking, paranoid-android beats are in top form. Maybe we need to feel—something, anything, as long as the feeling overpowers the noise of ads and tribal slogans—before we can think. Maybe we need to find the church of life before the obvious policy prescriptions appear obvious. Preach, Mike. Preach, Jaime. 8 ↑ ↓

Run the Jewels. RTJ4. Jewel Runners/BMG, 2020. Reviewed September 7, 2024. Notable tracks: “Ju$t,” “Pulling the Pin,” “A Few Words for the Firing Squad (Radiation)” “Goonies vs. ET,” “Walking in the Snow.”

Legalize It, Peter Tosh (1976)

Peter Tosh’s first solo album occupies a hallowed place in the history of roots reggae. The title track and the audacious cover art of Tosh kneeling in a field of ganja are perhaps too memorable. The album is much more than an advocacy platform for weed. Tosh’s impressive stylistic and thematic range is on full display—the sneering “Burial,” the (bouncy!) mama’s lament “What’cha Gonna Do,” and the soulful warning “Till Your Well Runs Dry” stand out, but every track is solid—but his characteristic defiance is the thread that runs through it all. The defiance is different in quality than Marley’s—more militant, to be sure, but also more aware of the creative possibilities of juxtaposing sweet melodies and raw anger. Tosh’s talent meshes perfectly with Marley’s unparalleled anthemic instinct and Bunny Livingston’s gentle sincerity, and in an ideal world we would speak of the Wailers in the same breathless breath as the Beatles. But we live instead in a world in which artistically magical relationships fall apart and people die before their gifts are exhausted. Okay. Sometimes a thing of unique beauty survives the ashes. 10 ↑ ↓

Tosh, Peter. Legalize It. Virgin, 1976. Reviewed October 24, 2023. Notable tracks: “Burial,” “What’cha Gonna Do,” “Till Your Well Runs Dry,” “Legalize It.”

The Ghost of Tom Joad, Bruce Springsteen (1995)

Critical praise for The Ghost of Tom Joad usually comes with qualifications. “Solid work, but not Nebraska.” “The high-water mark of Springsteen’s least creative period.” The caveats are unnecessary. Tom Joad is one of the finest folk albums of the late 20th century, a heart-in-your-throat walk through the darkness of post-Reagan America. The muddy melodies take some time to sink in, and that’s as it should be: nothing’s easy when you ain’t got that do-re-mi. Springsteen’s heroes are ex-cons fighting to stay afloat, undocumented immigrants cooking meth in the Central Valley, Border Patrol officers falling in love with the wrong person. When hope does peek through in Tom Joad, as it does now and then, it’s all the more powerful. Springsteen had an overtly political goal here, and it’s difficult for art to succeed when its intention, however virtuous, is so carefully chosen. But the album works because Bruce Springsteen’s great talent is empathy, the ability to let his characters to sing their lives simply and proudly. We’re left understanding what politics, beyond the corruption and careerism and cynicism, is really about: to make the world sensible, as it never has been. 10 ↑ ↓

Springsteen, Bruce. The Ghost of Tom Joad. Columbia, 1995. Reviewed October 20, 2023. Notable tracks: “The Ghost of Tom Joad,” “Youngstown,” “Sinaloa Cowboys,” “Across the Border.”

Another Side of Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan (1964)

In February 1964, Bob Dylan released The Times They Are a-Changin’, a barrage of (mostly) political ballads that would reignite the folk-protest movement. Six months later, Another Side hit the record shops. Dylan never liked the title, but it made the point clearly, if too obviously: Bob was worried about being defined solely as an activist singer, or defined at all. And so Another Side is a jumbled mess: simple pleas for sex/love (“All I Really Want to Do,” “Spanish Harlem Incident,” “Black Crow Blues”), break-up songs that range from slightly to very bitter (“I Don’t Believe You”, “To Ramona,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” “Ballad in Plain D”), throwaway talkies (“I Shall Be Free No.10, ” “Motorpsycho Nightmare”), and two songs that don’t fit into any category but reveal, paradoxically, Dylan’s consistency. The first is “My Back Pages,” in which 24-year-old Dylan chastises the naïve politics of 23-year-old Dylan—and in the process pens unforgettable verses about the relationship between politics and music (“Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats/Too noble to neglect/Deceived me into thinking/I had something to protect”). The second unclassifiable track is the most powerful song on Another Side: the stubbornly humane and insanely hopeful “Chimes of Freedom.” Dylan never stopped writing political songs, and, despite his insistent self-identification with plain ol’ American folk music, he also never let go of a kind of metaphysical exploration that made his political voice unique. Rimbaud, the critics say, with a sprinkling of Shakespeare and Twain. Maybe. But “Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed/For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones and worse/And for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe” suggests less the brooding wildness of Rimbaud or Shakespeare’s cosmic wonder than someone more compassionate. Bartolomé de las Casas, perhaps, if the good bishop had stumbled across a 12-string steel and a Leadbelly fakebook in the Chiapas jungle. 8 ↑ ↓

Dylan, Bob. Another Side of Bob Dylan. Columbia, 1964. Reviewed October 23, 2023. Notable tracks: “Chimes of Freedom,” “To Ramona,” “It Ain’t Me, Babe.”

↓ A-Z Index

The Rest

A-Z Index ↑

Against the Grain
Amassakoul
American Band
Another Side of Bob Dylan
Black on Both Sides
Bombay the Hard Way: Guns, Cars, and Sitars
BQE, The
Car Wheels on a Gravel Road
Complete Plantation Recordings, The
Dimanche à Bamako
Ghost of Tom Joad, The
Gracious Mama Africa
I Have No Everything Here
Legalize It
Ola Wave
Original Sufferhead
Reachin’
Rising Down
Rough and Rowdy Ways
RTJ4
Soul Journey
Troubadour
Visions of the Country
Viva Tu
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot