#351: For Your Pleasure, Roxy Music RS’s list of the Top 500 Albums of All Time is many things, but it is not well-written. (Not that my reviews ARE well-written, but that’s the whole joke, isn’t it?) For example, the blurb for this record calls it “the pop equivalent of…

#350: Music Of My Mind, Stevie Wonder I’ve known that Stevie Wonder was a genius ever since hearing “Sir Duke,” but I’m only just now learning that he was a child prodigy, who has been releasing music since he was freaking twelve years old. This album is considered to be…

#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. …