New York Times Archives Article
January 3, 2000, Monday
The Arts/Cultural Desk
Critics' Choices; Albums as Mileposts In a Musical Century
Music rarely divides itself into eras as neatly as it did with the century
that just ended. The 1900s were the disc era, when both musicians and
listeners took for granted that music could be captured and repeated. Not
too long from now it may be seen as a brief historical interlude between
sheet music and the Internet.
The phonograph was treated as a dictation machine for a decade after Thomas
Edison invented it in 1877. Cylinders of recorded music were first sold in
1890. But in 1901 the cylinder gave way to the disc, and the rest is in the
grooves. Recording preserved music that would have vanished into the air,
and it changed practically everything else that was related, from the length
of songs to the way they were performed, learned, sold and savored. It
catalyzed a century of mind-boggling musical invention in blues, jazz, show
tunes, country-and-western, gospel, salsa, soul, rock, hip-hop and all their
subgenres, along with international idioms from bossa nova to juju to
reggae. The immediacy and portability of recordings established a new,
intimate relationship between performers and listeners, while ideas bounced
around the world, leaving no style completely pure.
As 1999 ended, the popular-music critics of The New York Times convened to
select 25 albums representing turning points and pinnacles in 20th-century
popular music. As we argued, we found ourselves reflecting our own place and
time, concentrating on American music and with a slightly foreshortened
focus on the years since 1950.
We accepted one anachronism: choosing albums, not singles, for performers
throughout the century, although the LP was introduced only in 1948. Faced
with an abundance of deserving music, we also slipped in a few hits
collections and compilations. By necessity much is left out, but the chosen
albums are a foundation for understanding the popular music of the 20th
century.
Every short list suggests another, much longer one of alternate
possibilities. Below are our selections for the most significant albums of
the last century, in chronological order, along with another 25 worthy
contenders.
1. ENRICO CARUSO: ''The Greatest Tenor in the World'' (RCA Red Seal, 1902-20).
A chance intersection between a rising star tenor and a nascent medium begot
the disembodied voice of Caruso, floating from more than a million
gramophones, letting the world know that music no longer had to be a
site-specific experience. A powerful, exacting singer, Caruso went from
recording 10 sides in one day in a hotel room for $50 to laboring tirelessly
in the studio to overcome the many limitations of the process, becoming the
first of a new kind of pop star experienced three minutes at a time.
2. LOUIS ARMSTRONG: ''Hot Five's & Sevens'' (JSP or Columbia, 1925-1928). You
can't miss the annunciatory power of these recordings, threshold moments for
both arrangements and improvisation in jazz, as Louis Armstrong seized the
foreground to become jazz's first dominating soloist. Depending on whether
you go for Columbia's four volumes (no hiss, muted sound) or JSP's three
(preferred; slight hiss, vibrant sound), you'll need at least Volume I, with
the indelible ''Muskrat Ramble,'' the first scat vocal on ''Heebie Jeebies''
and the take-no-prisoners ''Cornet Chop Suey.'' You'll also need a later
volume, from after the virtuosic pianist Earl Hines arrived and deepened the
music, preferably one including ''West End Blues.''
3. AL JOLSON: ''Vol. 3: The Twenties: From Broadway to Hollywood'' (Pearl
Flapper, 1926-36). Al Jolson's substantial legacy remains a sore spot. He
was a Jewish immigrant who gained fame by donning blackface, the last
obvious minstrel but hardly the last race-crossing star. He was also a
shtick-loving ham, weeping and whistling on cue, joking and bantering and
delivering dramatic monologues; he bridged vaudeville and modern pop.
Jolson's was the first voice heard in a film, crooning in ''The Jazz
Singer'' in 1926, and he was arguably the first modern celebrity. Though
minstrelsy disturbs us now, his talents were huge.
4. THE BRISTOL SESSIONS'' (Country Music Foundation, 1927). This historic
recording session in Bristol, Tenn., by the Victor talent scout Ralph Peer
provided the lasting foundation for country music and heavily influenced the
development of blues and folk. In response to an open call for talent,
little-known musicians streamed down from the hills to Peer's makeshift
studio. Among the arrivals were two very different acts that would become
the standard-bearers of country music: a yodeling, tuberculosis-plagued
rambler with the blues, named Jimmie Rodgers, and a husband-wife-cousin team
called the Carter Family, whose harmonies, picking and songbook changed the
face of Southern music.
5. ROBERT JOHNSON: ''King of the Delta Blues Singers'' (Columbia, 1936-37).
Perhaps Robert Johnson was just one of many itinerant blues singers picking
his way around the Mississippi Delta. But the few songs he recorded come out
of a loudspeaker with a piercing, unforgettable intensity: tales of love in
vain, fast cars, betrayal and revenge, with the devil on his trail and in
his head. Johnson's stoic, syncopated guitar and his otherworldly voice were
his citadel in a world stacked against him. His songs provided a repertory
and attitude for rockers and rappers, haunting American music in his wake.
6. BILLIE HOLIDAY, Greatest Hits (Columbia/Legacy, 1935-41). Recorded music is,
in part, the story of a singer's relationship to a microphone. Amplification
allowed vocalists to turn songs into private disclosures as well as public
announcements. Billie Holiday was the greatest inhabitant of this ground
between the secret and the shared. She knew how to give flirtation an edge;
she could despair without dissolving. This compilation, featuring
collaborators like Count Basie and Lester Young, is illuminated by her
elegance, never overshadowed by her personal tragedy.
7. ''OKLAHOMA!,'' Original Broadway Cast (MCA, 1943). The modern Broadway book
musical, concentrating on storytelling as much as hit songs, began with
''Show Boat'' (by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II) in 1927 and reached
a milestone with ''Oklahoma!'' by Richard Rodgers and Hammerstein. In a
story of love, death and turf battles on the prairie, the rural setting and
colloquial words concealed the sophistication of songs that not only served
the plot but also could immediately stand on their own.
8. DUKE ELLINGTON: ''The Blanton-Webster Band'' (RCA, 1940-42). A luminous
20th-century invention, the big band, reached its artistic summit with Duke
Ellington. He commandeered individualistic soloists into an ensemble he
maneuvered as easily as his fingers on a piano. In these sessions, a stellar
lineup executes 66 kaleidoscopic three-minute miniatures. Melodies go
high-stepping along, countermelodies peek out of every crevice, and rhythms
somersault through changes in tunes that swing, strut, croon and sigh. The
compositions are cosmopolitan but gutsy, full of wisdom about both music and
the heart.
9. HANK WILLIAMS: ''40 Greatest Hits'' (Polydor, 1947-53). Hank Williams lived
to record in Nashville for only six years, but in that time he was
responsible for some of country's archetypal songs, its enduring myth of
hard living, its acceptance by the mainstream pop world and more. For many,
determining whether a song is country means holding it up to Williams's
alternately playful and doleful wafer-thin wail. Transcending the genre,
songs he wrote, including ''Cold, Cold Heart,'' ''I'm So Lonesome I Could
Cry'' and ''Your Cheatin'Heart'' (all included on this definitive
compilation), seem to bleed out of the speakers, embodying the pop ideal of
ache.
10. ELVIS PRESLEY: ''The Sun Sessions'' (RCA, 1954). The story is as familiar,
and nearly as sacred to some, as the one about that kid born in a manger: a
shy country boy enters a recording studio in 1954 and invents a new musical
religion. Rock didn't really emerge so cleanly from one white artist's burst
of genius. Nor was Elvis Presley's full cultural impact so immediate; it
emerged over decades of brilliance and schlock. But the myth of the miracle
remains, because this evidence is so compelling. Presley's crazy fusion of
country and blues still rattles the senses. The artistry feels utterly
accidental, and inevitable. It bursts through every reference point to
create its own ground.
11. JAMES BROWN: ''Star Time'' (Polydor, 1956-84). James Brown started out as a
heart-wrenching rhythm-and-blues belter, as this career-spanning compilation
makes clear. But he would be one of the most important musicians of the
century if he had never screamed a word. The funk that he invented was a
Quantum leap in rock rhythm, atomizing the beat to reconstruct it as a
dizzying, galvanizing mesh of percussive riffs that made the whole world
dance. The intricate, irresistible music was a sex machine all by itself.
12. TITO PUENTE: ''Dance Mania'' (RCA, 1957). Tito Puente, who led one of the
big three mambo orchestras in New York during the 1950's, is a talented
composer and arranger as well as timbalero and vibraphonist. This album, the
cream of his late-50's RCA records, represents the height of the mambo
craze, America's first lasting infatuation with Afro-Caribbean rhythms. Its
fusion of sophisticated jazz arrangements with Afro-Cuban percussion remains
hot and elegant, and it was a bellwether, plotting the salsa revolution of
the following decades.
13. FRANK SINATRA: ''Sings for Only the Lonely'' (Capitol, 1958). The tenacious
champion of the Tin Pan Alley songwriting tradition made this gorgeously
despairing album a totem for the American male gorging on doomed romance.
Sinatra's vocal technique was at its apex, but he carried such regular-guy
artlessness that he encouraged millions of men to identify with him. Nelson
Riddle's orchestrations were intelligent, cloudlike dreams moving through a
narrative, and the sequencing of songs -- including ''Angel Eyes,'' ''What's
New?,'' ''Blues in the Night'' and ''One for My Baby'' -- is as finely
calibrated as it gets.
14. JOHN COLTRANE: ''A Love Supreme'' (1965). Grim, serene and beautiful, this
is a valentine to God in suite form, and a milestone of the tumultuous 60's.
It encapsulated pain and anger and beatitude, and its mood of quiet
determination sainted the saxophonist forever. It is the work one associates
with John Coltrane, because what is a religious artist other than how he
communicates with his God? But sometimes smaller gestures last longer, and
finally it may not be as listenable as the album recorded six months
earlier, the miraculous ''Crescent'' (1964), with stronger original melodies
and a crystallization of the quartet's famous slow-and-strong group sound.
15. MILES DAVIS: ''Live at the Plugged Nickel'' (1965). This is roughly what you
hear, still, when you walk into the average jazz club on a good night: an
elasticity of form that allows for spur-of-the-moment arranging on small
motifs. But these club sets were elevated by the individual styles of Miles
Davis, Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. The
seven-disc complete version, representing all of the complete sets played in
the Chicago club during a week's engagement, is an endless education in the
vocabulary of modern jazz.
16. BOB DYLAN: ''Highway 61 Revisited'' (Columbia, 1965). Bob Dylan wanted to
say everything at once: generational challenges, Bible stories, cynicism,
affection, death-defying humor, desolation. On this album a flood of words
mingled high-flown allusions with slapstick tall tales as his tunes set
folky melodies on a collision course with electric blues. The molten,
unsettled music realized every ambition of a cocky, inspired songwriter who
irrevocably raised the stakes for what a rock song could do.
17. BEATLES: ''Revolver'' (Capitol, 1966). A gauntlet thrown at all of rock
music, ''Revolver'' dared anyone to make a better, more fully realized
studio album. It captured the world's most important rock band at its peak,
leaving music in the dust as the four searched for the higher ground that
threatened to take them too high in later albums. From the simple greeting
of ''Good Day Sunshine'' to the psychedelic tweaking of ''Tomorrow Never
Knows'' to the mock-classical lament of ''Eleanor Rigby,'' this album set
the parameters for thousands of musicians who followed. Without ''Revolver''
the Beach Boys never would have had a challenge to respond to, as they did
with their American pop masterpiece, ''Pet Sounds.''
18. ARETHA FRANKLIN: ''I Never Loved a Man the Way I Loved You'' (Atlantic,
1967). What is soul? Passion blessed with self-awareness; a universal force
channeled into individual expression. In 1967 soul was also the artistic
idiom of the civil rights movement. Aretha Franklin's miraculous melding of
gospel, jazz and blues, aided by the brilliant studio craftsmen of Muscle
Shoals, completely reflects its context. Yet this music is about her refusal
to be contained, within a vocal style, a feminine role or a racial
stereotype. So it bursts beyond its moment and sounds like freedom.
19. THE JIMI HENDRIX EXPERIENCE: ''Are You Experienced?'' (MCA, 1967). Jimi
Hendrix had played with rhythm-and-blues greats like Little Richard and B.
B. King, and that inheritance was his raw material. Countercultural rock's
language helped him express a transcendental vision grounded in the
particularities of his race and generation. Beginning by changing how an
electric guitar is played (many of his solos still seem like sonic
impossibilities), Hendrix and his band transformed fundamentals. Shifting
beats, skewed arrangements and lyrics as weird as dreams all buoyed
Hendrix's relentless innovation as he forged a paradigm still too complex
for most to unravel.
20. JONI MITCHELL: ''Blue'' (Reprise, 1971). A restless woman travels, falls in
love and longs for what she left behind as she moves on; in the background
1960's ideals crumble. Joni Mitchell turned unsparing autobiography into
sparse songs that quietly rejected symmetry and happy endings while they
poured out her yearning. As she ushered in a confessional mode for pop
songwriting, few of her emulators noticed that her seemingly unguarded
revelations were so finely constructed.
21. BOB MARLEY AND THE WAILERS: ''Legend'' (Island, 1973-80). Around the ?world Bob Marley may be the most influential musician of the second half of the
century. Though reggae fans may prefer the Wailers' earlier recordings with
Lee (Scratch) Perry, it was the songs on this posthumous album that proved
Marley to be the greatest ambassador any island has produced. His lyrics are
a one-world sermon, championing Rastafarianism, marijuana, pacifism, equal
rights and all degrees of love, physical and spiritual. With prophetic
fervor, Marley's melting tenor broadcast hope and redemption from the third
world to the first.
22. RAMONES: ''Ramones'' (Sire, 1976). The debut from this Queens quartet is punk's declaration of independence, shaping democratic experiments from the Sex Pistols to Riot Grrrl. With no more than three brutally delivered chords per song and lyrics like demented nursery rhymes, the Ramones banished rock's complacency by reasserting its id. Slice the songs open, and out tumbles the history of rock's teenage heart: the girl groups and Bo Diddley, comic books and horror flicks, awkward sex and romantic longing and, in every phrase, the defining moment of saying exactly what you want.
23. MICHAEL JACKSON: ''Thriller'' (Epic, 1982). The ultimate pop blockbuster was
a triumph of celebrity momentum and video marketing that turned Michael
Jackson into a star for every audience, across barriers of age, race, sex
and language. But the album offered more than simple pop bromides. Mixing
funk, rock and electronic dance music with dazzling rhythmic ingenuity, the
songs addressed a world of fears, from scary movies to stalkers. The singer
wanted to flee; instead, he piled on the hooks and danced through the
paranoia.
24. PUBLIC ENEMY: ''It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back'' (Def Jam,
1988). What jazz was from the 20's through the 40's and rock was from the
50's to the 70's, hip-hop has been for the remainder of the century. Every
great claim made for rap can be found in this album: a masterly collage of
organized noise, machine-sliced funk, incendiary politics, street poetry,
vaudeville comedy and aggressive production. It came out of nowhere,
exploding in a shrapnel shower of phrases -- ''don't believe the hype,''
''too black, too strong,'' ''bring the noise'' -- that set a newer, prouder
agenda for hip-hop. This was rap not at its scariest but at its most
politically and musically dangerous, a final fissure insuring a new
generation gap in American music.
25. NIRVANA: ''Nevermind'' (Geffen, 1991). Rock is often best made by young
people who distrust their own intellectualism, and Kurt Cobain was one of
the finest examples: a distressed kid who wanted to attack the power
structure by attacking himself and who sang his throat to shreds on curious,
ambivalent lyrics. ''I feel stupid and contagious''; ''I'm worst at what I
do best and for this gift I feel blessed.'' Anything that can intrigue
American high school students for a decade is powerful stuff, and the 12
roars of ambiguity on ''Nevermind'' were that. They were also the end of the
commonly understood division between underground and mainstream, and rock's
strongest statement in the 1990's.
THE ALTERNATES:
Bessie Smith: ''Collection'' (Columbia, 1923-33)
George Gershwin: ''Rhapsody in Blue'' (Paul Whiteman conducting, George
Gershwin piano, RCA, 1924)
''Anthology of American Folk Music'' (Smithsonian Folkways, recorded
1926-34, collected 1952)
Mills Brothers: ''The Anthology'' (MCA, 1931-68)
Charlie Parker: ''The Complete Savoy Studio Sessions'' (Savoy, 1944-48)
Muddy Waters: ''The Chess Box'' (MCA, 1947-72)
Edith Piaf: ''The Voice of the Sparrow'' (Capitol, 1941-60)
Ray Charles: ''The Ultimate Hits Collection'' (Rhino, 1953-89)
Chuck Berry: ''His Greatest Hits, Vols. 1 and 2'' (MCA, 1955-72)
Mahalia Jackson: ''Live at Newport'' (Columbia, 1958)
Joao Gilberto: ''The Legendary Joao Gilberto'' (World Pacific, 1958-61)
Ornette Coleman: ''The Shape of Jazz to Come'' (Atlantic, 1959)
Shirelles: ''The 25 All-Time Greatest Hits'' (Varese Sarabande, 1959-67)
''West Side Story,'' Original Film Soundtrack (Sony Classical, 1961)
Beach Boys: ''Pet Sounds'' (Capitol, 1966)
''The Velvet Underground and Nico,'' (Verve, 1967)
Rolling Stones: ''Beggars Banquet'' (Abkco, 1968)
Stevie Wonder: ''Innervisions'' (Motown, 1973)
Kraftwerk: ''Trans-Europe Express'' (Capitol, 1977)
''Saturday Night Fever'' (RSO, 1977)
King Sunny Ade and His African Beats: ''Juju Music'' (Mango, 1982)
Madonna: ''The Immaculate Collection'' (Sire, 1982-90)
Prince: ''Sign o' the Times'' (Warner Brothers, 1987)
Dr. Dre: ''The Chronic'' (Death Row/Interscope, 1993)
Nine Inch Nails: ''The Downward Spiral'' (TVT/Interscope, 1994)