#349: Kick Out The Jams, MC5 How ballsy do you have to be to have your debut album be a live album? …

#348: Time (The Revelator), Gillian Welch I love a hard pivot, like the one we’re doing now, from cerebral rap to sparse folk. I wonder if GZA ever listens to Gillian Welch? Or vice versa? A year and a half ago, I pulled into Kansas City listening to this record…

#347: Liquid Swords, GZA As always, I’m out of my depth with the Wu-Tang Clan. Check out my review of Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) and Raekwon’s Only Built 4 Cuban Linx… for some truly unimpressive takes. You know why? The Wu-Tang Clan is smarter than me. I have to…

#346: AM, Arctic Monkeys We’ve been stuck in the Seventies for a while now, so it’s nice to listen to music that was cool when I was sixteen. This album is so current that my boyfriend actually saw this tour, and allegedly witnessed Alex Turner snorting something backstage. Alex Turner…

#345: The Wild, the Innocent & The E Street Shuffle, Bruce Springsteen The more time I spend on the East Coast, the more I come to understand Bruce Springsteen. It’s not just his song titles or his lyrics, which drop so many New Jersey references that I started to forget…

#344: Funky Kingston, Toots & the Maytals If you recall, we’ve already come across Toots and his Maytals before. (Maytal: Jamaican word for “pure and good,” or “dew drop.”) “Pressure Drop” is on the soundtrack for The Harder They Come, and it was my favorite song. …

#343: Greatest Hits, Sly & the Family Stone I haven’t been having a great week. In fact, the day I listened to this record, I was pretty upset. Like, little-girl-tears upset. …

#342: Let It Be, The Beatles How now, The Beatles? It’s fitting that the record released a month after they broke up is also the last Beatles record we’re going to see on the RS 500 list. Funny, since I’ve done nothing but complain about them they appear. …

#341: Siamese Dream, The Smashing Pumpkins Another Nineties band, another Simpsons cameo. This one might be my family’s favorite Simpsons joke: Billy Corgan, Smashing Pumpkins. Homer Simpson, smiling politely. Three years before this appearance, Billy Corgan & Co. shocked everyone with a game changing record. I say “shocked” because the…