Favorite Music Artists

There are pretty pop songs, and then there’s the music that the Beach Boys made. Early singles were warm, inviting little ditties about cars, girls, and surfing. Then came albums like Today! and the indomitable Pet Sounds, which transitioned their sound into sophisticated textures and warm harmonies. Those harmonies only got more intricate and complex as time went on, culminating into the strange psychedelic sounds of Sunflower and Surf’s Up. Brian Wilson’s desire to trump Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound and the Beatles created numerous pop songs which could be described as perfection, think of “California Girls” or “Heroes and Villains.” The Beach Boys exemplify a California that no longer exists, and maybe it never did outside of their hit songs. That is what makes the Beach Boys so special, they create an entire musical world in the span of three to four minutes.

Favorite Songs:
1) Good Vibrations
2) God Only Knows
3) Don’t Worry Baby
4) Wouldn’t It Be Nice
5) In My Room
6) Wild Honey

I’ve described Johnny Cash before as the “brooding rebel” of the Sun Records line-up, but maybe a better description of him would be soulful renegade. If country music were to have a Mount Rushmore, Cash would be an obvious choice for the honor. His sound was sparse, pared down to his simple percussive guitar work and tortured baritone, and there was a haunted, mystical energy it. Whether he was telling elaborate stories in his songs or being defiant, Cash married the naked emotions of folk music to the world-weariness of country and add his own wild-man energy into the mix. He could just as easily sing a song about waiting for an execution or longing for spiritual peace and have you believing every word. While eternally tied to the world of country music, Cash still found a way to blur his sound so that one couldn’t imagine early rock and roll or punk rock without him.

Favorite Songs:
1) I Walk the Line
2) Ring of Fire
3) Cocaine Blues
4) God’s Gonna Cut You Down
5) The Man Comes Around
6) Hurt

There are punk bands, and then there are the Clash. A merry band of riotous and angry punks who married their political viewpoints, furious musicality, and various genres to explode punk into something weirder, stranger, more provocative. London Calling looked to the past with its cover harkening back to Elvis Presley’s debut, but blazed a trail towards rock and roll’s eventual future in which genres mashed and blended into something new. They were rebellious in spirit, but that rebellion always had a cause and an expertly crafted song to express it. The paranoia of capitalism (“Lost in the Supermarket”), societal ills (“Know Your Rights”), and the appropriation of renegade imagery (check the cover of Give ‘Em Enough Rope) are frequent themes in their work. It’s funny to think about, but the Clash never reached the heights in their heyday of what they believe they did, but they left a glorious legacy that has yet to dim in urgency or power.

Favorite Songs:
1) I Fought the Law
2) London Calling
3) Should I Stay or Should I Go?
4) Hateful
5) Career Opportunities
6) Clampdown

The Cure began life as a simplistic post-punk power trio, and it wasn’t long before their sound began to compass massive, gorgeous gloomy soundscapes. Underneath the all-black image is a pop catalog of hummable melodies, inventive lyrics, and killer guitar hooks. While the line-up of musicians has changed greatly over the years, Robert Smith has always been the figurehead and main creative spark of the band. His ghoulish image occasionally pins the band as a goth outfit, but their textured sounds on Disintegration and big pop hooks on songs like “Friday, I’m in Love” prove they’re more diverse than often given credit for. Strange to think that a group primarily writing songs about alienation and depression went on to become arena-rock gods. Yet that’s why everyone loves the Cure, their oblique songs speak to the misfit teenager in all of us.

Favorite Songs:
1) Jumping Someone Else’s Train
2) Just Like Heaven
3) A Forest
4) Primary
5) All Cats Are Grey
6) Plainsong

Bob Dylan isn’t a rock star, he’s a strange little poet shaman from another time and place, a wanderer in his musical life. He pioneered the school of confessional singer/songwriter, yet he was just as instrumental in the development of more hallucinatory, rambling songwriting. Beginning as a folk singer, he was soon turning the folk song into a form of pop songwriting, before abandoning it and going electric, tossing that aside and moving into country-rock. This is just the quickest of overviews to what he managed to accomplish. His influence was immediate in his peers, but also sent deeply felt ripples that continue to this very day. His voice is not classically beautiful, but it helped redefine what a singer could be, like so much of Dylan accomplished this tiny example could be writ large as his legacy.

Favorite Songs:
1) It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue
2) Mr. Tambourine Man
3) Just Like a Woman
4) The Times They Are A-Changin’
5) Like a Rolling Stone
6) Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right

“There wouldn’t be any Beatles without Buddy Holly,” a direct quote from Sir Paul McCartney. If that doesn’t give enough credence to Buddy Holly’s importance to the history of rock and roll, I don’t know what else anyone could possibly want. It’s hard to wrap your brain around the fact that Holly was only a major player in the music for a mere 18 months, producing an astonishing body of work in that time which has made him immortal. To think of what else he could have accomplished had he not died at 22 is infuriating and depressing. But what he left us with is an assortment of songs that weave in and out of rock, pop, country, and rockabilly with grace, held together by Holly’s hiccupping vocals and strong songwriting. That last part is probably the most enduring and lasting trend Holly brought to rock and roll aside from his sound, he made songwriting an essential skill for any musician.

Favorite Songs:
1) Peggy Sue
2) Not Fade Away
3) I’m Gonna Love You Too
4) Rave On
5) You’re So Square (Baby, I Don’t Care)
6) It’s So Easy

In my opinion, there’s Joni Mitchell, and then there’s everyone else. No one really comes close to matching the beauty, poetry, or specificity of her lyrical prowess. As a guitarist she is highly underrated, crafting strange chord progressions and odd tunings which painted new musical colors to play with. She’s never been an artist concerned with hits or huge sales, preferring to follow her muse to whatever strange journeys and locations it took her too. While frequently dubbed a folk singer, her music has more in common with jazz or pop standards, and later more experimental albums like Hejira show this off to beautiful effect. Joni Mitchell turned every emotion into tenderly rendered and evocative art.

Favorite Songs:
1) All I Want
2) Both Sides Now
3) Free Man in Paris
4) Big Yellow Taxi
5) Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire
6) Carey

It’s hard to describe Prince, his career is too wildly full of detours and strange choices, his output so massive that it’s almost overwhelming to scale. I think the only word that can properly describe Prince is singular. In his commitment to redefine and fuse pop, funk, rock, dance, and soul into some kind of crazy sex-and-religion obsessed prism is what makes him so great. No matter how inconsistent or maddeningly off-the-wall his choices, they’re consistently informed by his purple-hued point-of-view. His first masterpiece was Dirty Mind, and his run of incredible albums/singles lasted throughout the 80s and early 90s, a legacy that most artists would be happy to rest upon, but not Prince. He was always out there doing his funky best until the very end.

Favorite Songs:
1) Erotic City
2) Let’s Pretend We’re Married
3) When Doves Cry
4) Delirious
5) Purple Rain
6) Dirty Mind

The 1970s were not the kindest era to rock and roll, too many bloated songs and indulgent nature of arena rock of the time. Then the Ramones came crawling out of a sewer in Queens with three chords, inane lyrics, and stripped the heart of rock and roll down to the frayed basics. Complexity was left in the dust for simplicity and manic energy. Joey Ramone didn’t have much range, but no one sounded as exuberant as he did on so many of their singles. What returns me to the Ramones music time and time again, aside from the buzz saw tone, are the anti-social themes, that strange alienation one frequently feels in life. Their songs relied upon catchphrase-like lyrics wrapped up in the pop influence of bands like the Beach Boys, but played without such finesse. The Ramones were a big cartoon version of rebellious bad boys, flipped rock inside-out, and embraced kitsch as an ethos.

Favorite Songs:
1) I Just Want to Have Something to Do
2) I Wanna Be Sedated
3) Rockaway Beach
4) Blitzkrieg Bop
5) Today Your Love, Tomorrow the World
6) California Sun

Most will only remember them as a two-hit wonder from the 80s, but once you discover the albums of Romeo Void, it’s hard not be in love with them. They played their music with the brainy, arty intensity of Roxy Music, threw in some jazz-style saxophone flourishes, and tied it all together with Debra Iyall’s dark, poetic imagery. Not quite punk, but definitely New Wave, Romeo Void emerged from a group of misfits who met at art school. They said their name means a lack of modern romance, and their rapid-fire lyrics definitely hammer that point home in songs like “A Girl in Trouble (Is a Temporary Thing).” Maybe because she’s a chubby girl, maybe because she’s a woman of color, but I’ve always felt that Debra Iyall never got the proper credit paid to her for the originality she brought to the New Wave scene. They only released three studio albums, an EP, and a greatest hits collection during their brief tenure, but it’s some of the best, most underrated music of the era.

Favorite Songs:
1) Never Say Never
2) Chinatown
3) Fear to Fear
4) Say No
5) Talk Dirty to Me
6) Confrontation

Phil Spector had a remarkable roster of talent, but something about his massive productions and Ronnie Spector’s romantic vocals married into something truly beautiful. Legend has it that Brian Wilson’s first reaction to “Be My Baby” was to pull off the side of the road and weep. It doesn’t matter whether or not this story is true, it’s an appropriate reaction to these “little symphonies for the kids,” as Spector has dubbed them. Spector’s building his Wall of Sound around these girls, who acted more like a street gang than a pop group. They spoke directly to male listeners instead of the common practice of treating these songs like a gossipy session with their closest girlfriends. The Ronettes were the cool, sexy, bad girls hanging out on the corner and harmonizing while other groups indulged in glamour and sophistication, this is why they’re my favorite.

Favorite Songs:
1) Be My Baby
2) Walking in the Rain
3) I Can Hear Music
4) Chapel of Love
5) Keep on Dancing
6) You Came, You Saw, You Conquered

A group of art school graduates who combined fashionable images, with sleek sexuality, pop music experimentation, and earnestly soulful vocals. Bryan Ferry was addicted to melody and crooning, while Brian Eno wanted to expand the possibilities of art-rock, and their early albums see these two personalities clashing beautifully. Icons of cinema were frequently employed as visual metaphors, and an addiction to glamour and the avant-garde continued even after Eno’s departure. They managed to work in elements of soul and disco, before ending their career with the sophisticated and romantic Avalon. From Roxy Music’s head sprung the beginnings of New Wave and punk, and they’re still somehow severely underrated.

Favorite Songs:
1) Virginia Plain
2) In Every Dream Home a Heartache
3) Editions of You
4) Love Is the Drug
5) More Than This

Listening to the Stooges is to hear rock and roll played with a primitive, visceral, grimy edge that did all of the foundation work for punk, metal, and other forms of hard rock. Their music is alive, and unafraid to be confrontational. They were as hard and weird as the Velvet Underground, but a little less cerebral. The Stooges thrust vulgarly about in a mad dance, threatening to explode into an orgy of sex and violence right before your very eyes. Where much of rock and roll was played with a penchant for the rhythmic foundations of R&B, the Stooges played their few chords with little finesse, sounding more like a group of underground dwellers who found abandoned instruments and decided to make a wild noise. Too dangerous for the mainstream of their era, they’re now considered one of the greatest bands, which is exactly as it should be.

Favorite Songs:
1) I Wanna Be Your Dog
2) Search and Destroy
3) T.V. Eye
4) Real Cool Time
5) No Fun
6) Penetration

The Velvet Underground are a signpost in the evolution of rock and roll. There was everything before them, and then they broke down everything into mutated shapes and experimental forms. Rock and pop music had flirted with lyrics about sex and drug use, but never with honest candor of Lou Reed’s musings. The Velvets magic occurs in the way that they mash a primitive, experimental, sometimes highly aggressive style of playing with artsy, often obliquely poetic lyrics. This fusion of avant-garde formal expression and matter-of-fact vocal delivery defined a narcotic, street-smart cool that reverberated into punk, New Wave, heavy metal, and singer/songwriter confessionals. A band out of step with their era, time has only been kind to the Velvet Underground’s work and enduring legacy.

Favorite Songs:
1) Candy Says
2) Heroin
3) Pale Blue Eyes
4) White Light/White Heat
5) I’ll Be Your Mirror
6) I Heard Her Call My Name