"I guess he's an XBox / And I'm more Atari"

Oh, man. If you haven't heard this song yet, prepare to hear it everywhere. This is going to be a smash hit for the ages.

Gnarls Barkley's Cee-Lo Green, with "Fuck You!" And if you hadn't guessed from the title alone, it's not exactly work safe.

Synchronicity

So last night I wrote that endless essay on Lost (one of several to come, of course), and then I come across an article on the new Weezer album, set to disappoint us next month.

Now, I've talked about Weezer before, more than once. Short version: I love their first two albums like best friends, but find their output since frustrating, inconsistent and boring. (BOCTAOE.) But one thing I do like about post-Pinkerton Weezer is Rivers Cuomo's refusal to take the band's image seriously. Here, take a look at the cover of 2008's self-titled "red album":

And then, their (wretchedly awful) 2009 release, Raditude:

I love those covers. They're funny, even if the music they represent is not so great.

So last week, Weezer announces the title of their new record, Hurley. Yes, like Hurley from Lost. And everyone's like, "Huh huh, they should just put a picture of Jorge Garcia on the cover, heh heh."

So they did.

That's it. That's the cover of Hurley, Weezer's eighth album. Not even any words, not the band name, nothing. Just Hurley. Hurley.

And I would think they were making fun of Jorge, except (a) they're not mean people, and (b) I'm pretty sure Jorge and Rivers are friends. As seen in this photo...

...which is, of course, where they cropped Jorge's face for the cover.

I really don't know what to make of it, honestly. Is it joke? Is it a tribute? Is it brilliant? Is it lazy?

You tell me.

(Credit: The A.V. Club.)

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Seven (77-74)

Consider this my invisible post. We'll see if anyone sees it. (I'm posting this because it almost completely written anyway.)

77. Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf
This album's loose concept is that it's the songs picked up on the radio of a car headed from Los Angeles to Mexico in the middle of the night. Fitting, then, that most of the tracks barrel forward with single-minded drive and focus. Josh Fromme lives and dies by his robotic, pounding riffs, and he's wise enough to hire drum master Dave Grohl to handle percussion duties. The songs hum and drone with an incessant urgency: "No One Knows," "Go with the Flow" and "First It Giveth" are must-haves for any soundtrack for an endless late-night drive. But they save their best gag for last -- the gorgeous and terrifying "Mosquito Song," parked at the end of the album, the only moment of delicate beauty.

76. The New Pornographers, Electric Version
There are other members of this band -- it's a "supergroup," apparently made of Canadian stars -- but it's really all about Niko Case. Feeling down? Listen to "All for Swinging You Around," and let her voice blast that sadness from every dark corner of your soul. "The Laws Have Changed" is a great song, until Niko comes in and makes it amazing. That's short-changing the rest of the group, obviously, and the fact is that everyone brings their A-game to this, creating a power-pop masterpiece on basically every track. But -- just between you and me -- it's all about Niko.

75. The Mars Volta, Frances the Mute
I guess in addition to being an obsessive completist, I also have an unwavering respect for artists that do exactly what they want to do, no matter what anyone else thinks. Take the Mars Volta -- a group of rational people might try to make their lyrics less obtuse than "She was a mink handjob in sarcophagus heels." Or at least pick just one language to sing those lyrics in. But clearly the Mars Volta are anything other than rational. Their song cycle not only begins in the middle of a song, its title track -- and "key" song -- isn't even on the damn album at all. But the music that is here, songs with impenetrable titles like "Cygnus...Vismund Cygnus" and "Miranda, That Ghost Just Isn't Holy Anymore," is flat-out jaw-dropping. They call this "progressive rock," but Pink Floyd was progressive rock, and there's no way the Floyd could have kept up with this schizophrenic lunacy. Frances the Mute is gargantuan -- the final piece, "Cassandra Gemini," clocks in at over 32 minutes, and features more melodies and themes than most other albums get through in twelve songs. If every band was as fearless as the Mars Volta, the world might be a lot better for it.

74. Fleetwood Mac, Rumours
There's a time in one's life when your only cultural knowledge comes from your parents. And then there comes the time when you reject it and find your own way. And then there comes the time when you look back and realize that maybe your parents got it right once in a while. Rumours is an album I loved as a kid, hated as a teenager, and have now fallen back in love with again as an adult. Because, really, there's no denying these songs. "Gold Dust Woman" sounds as fresh and amazing as it did when I was nine, and as it must have sounded when it was released over twenty years ago. "The Chain" is one of the perfect rock songs, starting so sparse and quiet and building to an amazing finish. I don't care who you are or what genre of music you prefer -- everyone can love Rumours. It's okay. Trust me: your mom was right on this one.

How Very, Very 1986

So here's the new Weezer single, "(If You're Wondering If I Want You To) I Want You To." The new album, Raditude, drops November 5.

What do you think of the song? I wasn't feeling it until the Beach Boys-style harmony bridge. But I'm curious how this one lands.



EDIT: Okay, a second listen won me over. It's like a long-lost Dexy's Midnight Runners track or something. Not really digging the video, though.

An Album That Might Reach Through Your Speakers and Peel Your Face Off

Even though I put the Foo Fighters' second record at number 80 in my 100 albums list, I actually don't like the band all that much. The Colour and the Shape was their peak, and despite a few bright spots since -- "Stacked Actors," "The Pretender," that cover of "Darling Nikki" -- it's been a pretty mediocre bunch of albums since. Why is that? Well, the fact is that Dave Grohl is not that great a songwriter. He is, however, one of the greatest drummers ever to walk the planet, which is why this news has me so excited.

Check it out: Them Crooked Vultures, a new Supergroup band consisting of Grohl on drums where he belongs; Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age on guitar; and on bass -- no joke -- John Paul Jones. Yes, Led Fucking Zeppelin John Paul Jones. Sweet fancy Moses.

Queens of the Stone Age is great all over -- Songs for the Deaf, in fact, is featured in my next Musical Canon installment. But John Paul Freaking Jones? Is it actually legal to keep this much awesome in one place without a permit from Homeland Security or something? I've been trying to come up with a way this band could be more cool for about twenty minutes now, but I can't do it.

The album is called simply Them Crooked Vultures, and it will be released November 17. I don't have a single or a video to play you, so I leave you only with the tracklist:

1. No One Loves Me & Neither Do I
2. Mind Eraser, No Chaser
3. New Fang
4. Dead End Friends
5. Elephants
6. Scumbag Blues
7. Bandoliers
8. Reptiles
9. Interlude with Ludes
10. Warsaw or the First Breath You Take After You Give Up
11. Caligulove
12. Gunman
13. Spinning in Daffodils
    

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Six (82-78)

It occurs to me now how much longer I have until we finish this thing. I mean, we're just now getting out of the 80s. It didn't really settle in until yesterday, when I was tweaking the list -- I'd made a few egregious errors in ordering the albums from 40-60, but that's all settled now. I've got the whole thing in an Excel spreadsheet, of which here is a tiny, tiny piece:

(The titles in red -- which are numbers 51-100 on this list -- I've given a four-star rating at Rate Your Music. The gold albums, ranked 16-50, have a four-and-a-half star rating. The top fifteen, ranked a perfect five stars, are green, but aren't in this image, obviously. I can't imagine why I thought you would give a damn about this.)

Anyway. With that in mind, tonight we're gonna be a little more brief. One paragraph, if I can manage it. And even though I didn't do this on purpose, it's all '90s rock this time around. Go figure.

82. The Verve Pipe, The Verve Pipe
You remember from earlier in the list: I seem to love the album bands make after the one that makes them famous. In this case, the Verve Pipe followed the one-hit-wondertastic smash "The Freshmen" with this album-long meditation on stardom and the temporary nature of fame. The Verve Pipe is the rare sophomore album that seems to know it's a sophomore album, and there's no way the band could have actually believed these dark, sarcastic songs would actually hit. Even the songs that don't fit that theme are resigned and defeated, filled with broken hearts and bad dreams.

81. Oasis, Be Here Now
The first three Oasis albums, to me, each sound like the controlled substance the Gallagher brothers used most during its creation. Definitely, Maybe has the loud, clumsy roar of a good, drunken bender; (What's the Story) Morning Glory? has the sound and pace of a contemplative cigarette. Be Here Now, with its endless track listing and mammoth songs and arrangements, could only be the result of a mountain of cocaine. And it sure didn't appeal to audiences at the time -- Be Here Now is apparently the most-often pawned record in Britain, and not a single track from it made their greatest hits collection a few years back. But you know what? All that sound, all those guitars, all that noise? That's why I like the album so much. "All Around the World" could just be a throwaway pop song, but Noel Gallagher -- bless his douchebag black little heart -- stretches it out to over nine minutes, adds three (!) orchestras and something like fifteen key changes, and it becomes a fucking work of art. "D'You Know What I Mean?" doesn't need the two minutes of helicopter noises and Morse code at the beginning, I guess...but at the same time it really does. These songs have what Oasis songs had never had and would never have again -- weight. They could have just rewritten "Wonderwall" a dozen times and made everyone happy, but instead they took their body weights in Bolivian marching powder and recorded the longest, loudest fuck you they could muster. And it doesn't hurt that these are the best, most compelling songs the band would ever put together, with some of Noel's strongest lyrics (and Noel's lyrics are always awful -- he makes Coldplay look like Leonard Cohen). It's too bad they never tried anything this incredible again.

80. Foo Fighters, The Colour and the Shape
Dave Grohl recorded most of the first Foo Fighters album in his spare time, while Nirvana was still a thriving entity. After its success, he had to prove on his second album he was more than just Nirvana's drummer -- he needed to prove his chops as a genuine frontman. Luckily for him, he knocked it out of the park, and The Colour and the Shape is his best post-Nirvana work. This is late-nineties modern rock at its very finest -- "Monkey Wrench" is one of the best songs ever written, and "Everlong" isn't far behind. This is the first album of what I think of internally as my High School Trilogy -- the three albums that, honestly, I don't think I could have survived those four years without. The Colour and the Shape was one of them: when Grohl ends the record by repeatedly screaming I'm not scared, I felt like I could find a new way home, too.

79. Smashing Pumpkins, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness
Billy Corgan is kind of an insufferable tool, but this is the album he was born to make. (It's also the third double album on the list. I can't help it, I like epics.) Everything Smashing Pumpkins was great at, everything they weren't so great at, all of it on display here. The loud ("Bullet with Butterfly Wings"), the melodic ("1979"), the twee ("Thirty-Three") and the insane ("We Only Come Out at Night"), stretching out as far as humanly possible. Siamese Dream seemed better at the time, but they've flipped sides completely looking back now: Mellon Collie feels like a perfect document of its era, when modern rock music was trying to morph into something else entirely -- maybe something electronic, maybe something grand and orchestral, maybe something ugly and out of its mind. It did none of those things, as we ended up with nu-metal and the post-grunge trash that Nickelback and Creed would deliver, but Billy Corgan was at least trying, dammit. For all its faults, Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness was a statement, something most artists of the time couldn't be bothered with. Oh, and "Zero" is just a great fucking song. So there.

78. Days of the New, Days of the New II
See my note in entry 82 about sophomore albums. Travis Meeks recorded the first Days of the New album at the age of seventeen, and it got a lot of play on rock radio for its unique sound -- he wrote grungy rock songs, but played them all acoustically, giving his work an amber tint and special quality. So, of course, he immediately fired the rest of his band and recorded this gigantic follow-up, which is about as sharp a turn one can take artistically without switching genres altogether. It's still rock, I guess -- but I can't think of a whole lot of other rock music that sounds like this, with the oboes and violins taking the melodies on several tracks. Meeks ties it all together as one massive piece, dropping in instrumentals and sound effects freakouts whenever the mood strikes. Suffice to say, Days of the New II was a massive commercial bomb on release, as fans of the first record fled to Creed concerts in horror.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Five (86-83)

[All entries.]

86. Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
It doesn't get a whole lot more indie than this. Clap Your Hands's debut album was originally self-released, and by "self-released," I mean "the bassist personally licked the stamps and mailed discs to people." That independent attitude informs the entire record: this is noisy, jangly weirdo pop, insanely catchy and intensely weird at the same time. Alec Ounsworth's vocals stretch and snap like rubber bands -- sometimes they're on key, sometimes they're not; sometimes he enunciates, sometimes he doesn't. Sometimes the songs are good, sometimes they're not: the opening track is one of the most off-putting pieces of music I've heard, and it's meant to be that way. If you want into this album, you're going to have to earn it.

And that's probably why this is such a great record, and one of my favorites: its utter and complete confidence. They know their songs are good enough to deserve your attention, and if you're not willing to keep up with them through "Clap Your Hands!," well, that's your problem. The album's final track, "Upon This Tidal Wave of Young Blood," features my favorite moment: the band halts in transition from one part of the song to the next, hanging in the bridge as Ounsworth sticks on the phrase "child stars" like a skipping LP, repeating both music and words for what seems like a minute. The tension builds, and builds, and builds, and then releases you back with no warning. If that's too much for you, well, Clap Your Hands doesn't really care. (Which led, of course, to the inevitable hipster backlash, and I'm not sure it's cool to like this album anymore. Because I give a damn.)

85. The Postal Service, Give Up
Ben Gibbard's been writing delicate sad bastard songs for ages now with his band, Death Cab for Cutie, so I'm not sure why it's such a surprise that he'd turn out a set of similarly beautiful tracks for his side project. But the Postal Service -- a collaboration with electronic musician Jimmy Tamborello -- brings an entirely different feel, and the result is fantastic. Give Up is icy and dark, but pulses with energy -- a sad, mournful energy, but energy nonetheless.

It's the kind of album I wish I'd had in high school. Lonely, heartbroken songs like "Recycled Air" would have spun over and over in my CD player. I would have tried my best at writing pale retreads of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight" in my notebooks, trying as hard as I could to recapture that elusive feeling. I would've tried to name my garage band We Will Become Silhouettes, and my friends would have refused.

But the best song here is, stunningly, the least despairing. "Such Great Heights" is easily the best thing either of the artists here have ever done and one of the best love songs ever written by anyone, four-and-a-half minutes of driving pop that is as close to perfect as one can get. And when someone as insistently depressed as Ben Gibbard says, "They will see us waving from such great heights," the hope in his voice is moving beyond words. If I'd heard it when I was fifteen, I probably would have been a much more pleasant guy to be around.

84. Genesis, Duke
Here's the thing with Phil Collins, okay: the guy takes a lot of crap, but he's actually a fairly talented guy. His tendencies toward schmaltz and over-emoting are problematic, but there was a time when he had a band that would rein him in. That band was Genesis, of course, and Duke is the last time they put out an album before the Phil Factor started pushing them over the shark and into bland irrelevance. Even the poppier excursions -- "Misunderstanding," I'm looking at you -- hold up much better than, say, "Sussudio."

Duke is also the last time Genesis really stretched out like the progressive rock pioneers they could be. "Duke's Travels/Duke's End" is as compelling a piece as they ever recorded, almost eleven minutes of rich, layered music; "Turn It on Again" may be pop, but its 13/4 time signature adds a rare element. Those instincts running in opposite directions -- to one side straightforward rock, to the other progressive experimentation -- came into perfect balance on Duke, which stands as their last great album.

83. Genesis, The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway
Of course, there was a time when Phil Collins was just a drummer, and a truly demented man stood up front...sometimes dressed as a flower. If Duke was Phil's best Genesis record, then The Lamb is Peter Gabriel's masterpiece, a mammoth two-disc suite that shows all of Gabriel's lunacies in full bloom. A barely intelligible story, laden with symbolism and sexual imagery, coupled with the most intricate, elaborate music Genesis ever recorded together. The creation of this album drove Gabriel from the group completely, but I almost can't blame the band. How could they be expected to keep up with this?

I won't try to summarize the story, because I can't, so I'll stick to the songs, which are uniformly brilliant. "Broadway Melody of 1974" throws pop culture into a blender, dishing out a surrealist treasure ("Lenny Bruce declares a truce and plays his other hand/Marshall Mcluhan, casual viewin', head buried in the sand"). "The Grand Parade of Lifeless Packaging" starts tiny, but stacks on itself until it reaches titanic size. "The Carpet Crawlers" might be the best song Genesis ever put to tape, hushed and gorgeous, swaying with such power and beauty that it almost tricks you into thinking you understand what Gabriel's talking about. (You won't, though: "Mild mannered supermen are held in Kryptonite/While the wise and foolish virgins giggle, with their bodies glowing bright/Through the door, a harvest feast is lit by candlelight." Yeah, and don't even get me started on the part with the raven who steals the protagonist's penis.)

I love The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway for a lot of the same reasons I love Clap Your Hands, now that I think about it: it's a flat-out shitballs crazy record confident enough to let all its weirdness flow out as far as it can. There are no "safe" songs here, no ready-for-radio singles to give the audience an entrance into the album. There's just The Lamb, all of it, and you're either in or you're out.

My 25 Favorite Album Covers

And of course, this is solely about the quality of the cover art -- the actual music inside doesn't always stack up, unfortunately.

25.
Neon Bible
Arcade Fire









24.
A Momentary Lapse of Reason
Pink Floyd









23.
King of America
Elvis Costello









22.
Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles









21.
Stankonia
OutKast








20.
Illinois
Sufjan Stevens









19.
Late Registration
Kanye West









18.
Dark Side of the Moon
Pink Floyd









17.
Dirt
Alice in Chains









16.
The Slim Shady LP
Eminem









15.
Korn
Korn









14.
...And Justice for All
Metallica









13.
Quadrophenia
The Who









12.
Who's Next
The Who









11.
Relentless
Bill Hicks









10.
Big Whiskey and the GrooGrux King
Dave Matthews Band









9.
Ride the Lightning
Metallica









8.
Animals
Pink Floyd









7.
Peter Gabriel 3
Peter Gabriel









6.
Frances the Mute
The Mars Volta









5.
Nevermind
Nirvana









4.
Wish You Were Here
Pink Floyd









3.
The Blueprint
Jay-Z









2.
Master of Puppets
Metallica









1.
Abbey Road
The Beatles

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Four (89-87)

By the way, I'm getting all of the album art for these lists from Rate Your Music, a handy music cataloging and research site. In case you were curious. Which you probably were not.


89. Ben Folds, Rockin' the Suburbs
Ben Folds is an avowed admirer of Randy Newman, so it's no surprise that his first solo pop album would take a similar approach: a series of short stories and character sketches, masterfully crafted and performed. Actually, the biggest surprise is how little his work suffers from the lack of his backing band -- though I love the Ben Folds Five (and they will most certainly show up later in our countdown), he shines here alone, playing almost all of the instruments himself. That autonomy results in an album that's more tightly wound than previous efforts (all those overdubs leave little room for improvisation), but the songs and performances are so brilliant that it doesn't matter.

And for a guy who achieved fame as frontman of "the piano band that rocks," Rockin' the Suburbs is stunningly low-key. Sure, the title track is a heavy hitter (and truly hilarious, as Folds lampoons the whiny white-boy metal of Fred Durst and his ilk), but it's wildly out of place. Even more thumping songs like "Not the Same" are tempered and almost delicate. And the album does work best at its most quiet: "Fred Jones Pt. 2" is practically whispered, and "The Luckiest" is love-song cheese at its very finest.

88. MC Frontalot, Nerdcore Rising
Someone over at Pitchfork wrote recently that rapping about the internet is never cool. Well, MC Frontalot has never been very interested in being cool, as each and every beat of Nerdcore Rising proves. This is a phenomenally geeky record, obsessed with everything you'd expect to find rattling around a nerd's head: illegal music downloads, Star Wars, collectible card games, Penny Arcade, Nigerian email scams and girls in goth makeup. And as for Pitchfork, they might give a listen to "Indier Than Thou," which has choice words for their often tiring hipsterism.

The geekiness wouldn't be noteworthy if Frontalot weren't such a talented rapper, but thankfully he's a genius -- his work on tracks like "Charity Case" and "This Old Man" can stand up to any other "real" rapper you'd care to mention. And Front's blinding-fast delivery stacks up the clever rhymes and jokes high and deep, unfolding in the listener's ear over multiple plays. Screw Pitchfork: Frontalot turns being uncool into a art form.

87. Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks
Some of Dylan's best songs are like listening to someone juggle. Take "Simple Twist of Fate," one of Blood's very best songs. He keeps piling on the lyrics, telling his elaborate and intricate story, and you know that every verse is going to end with a word that rhymes with "fate"...but you don't know which one. And that lends the entire song with an almost mysterious air of tension, waiting for him to finally land on that last line. This wouldn't work for most songwriters, of course. But Dylan isn't most songwriters, and Blood on the Tracks isn't most albums.

Inspired by either the end of a marriage (if you ask critics and fans) or the short stories of Anton Chekhov (if you ask Dylan), Blood on the Tracks is a largely bleak, somber affair; its short bursts of humor ("Tangled up in Blue") ring out like firecrackers. "Idiot Wind," on the other hand, is a head-shaking, drunken scream of rage, enveloping both the listener and Dylan's target in a shroud of bile: "You're an idiot, babe/It's a wonder that you still know how to breathe."

This is the album that turned me into a Dylan fan. I'd heard some of his bigger hits, but this was the first Dylan album I ever truly fell in love with. When I heard him tripping through "Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts," I finally understood what all the fuss was about. I don't see how anyone could hear "Shelter from the Storm" and not understand it.

I Me Meme

I'm actually trying to post on a regular, near-daily basis again. I hope you've noticed.

So: here's a meme. I encourage any and all to participate.

The meme: Using only song titles from one artist, cleverly answer these questions.

My artist - The Beatles.

1. Are you male or female? - "Mother Nature's Son"
2. Describe yourself. - "I Am the Walrus"
3. How do you feel about yourself? - "I Feel Fine"
4. Describe where you currently live. - "Octopus's Garden"
5. If you could go anywhere, where would you go? - "Across the Universe"
6. Your best friend is... - "Mr. Moonlight"
7. Your favorite color is... - "For You Blue"
8. You know that... - "All You Need Is Love"
9. What's the weather like? - "Rain"
10. If your life was a TV show, what would it be called? - "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey"
11. What is life to you? - "Magical Mystery Tour"
12. What is the best advice you have to give? - "Think for Yourself"
13. If you could change your name, what would it be? - "Mean Mr. Mustard"

God, I love the Beatles.

The jwalkernet Musical Canon: Part Three (93-90)

[Hey, yeah, it's back. Time to finish what I started. Previous entries are here and here.]

93. Nine Inch Nails, The Fragile
Trent Reznor's work has always been frustrating and uneven to me. That he managed to fill two complete discs with music not only listenable but jaw-droppingly amazing, then, is not just impressive, it's a goddamn miracle. The Fragile is the sound of a master studio craftsman branching out in every direction he can, as far out as he can, all at once. It's a little overwhelming at times, in fact -- the frequent sparse instrumentals serve as much-needed breathers. At least, some of them do: "Just Like You Imagined" starts quietly, but ends up pounding with more force than anything Reznor had constructed before, or since.

I guess it's technically a concept album, though I'm not sure I can parse what exactly that concept might be. Things start bad ("fuck the rest and stab it dead"), get worse ("it didn't turn out the way you wanted it, did it?"), and then bottom out entirely ("the closer I get, the worse it becomes"). But along the way, Trent finds himself reaching outward for the first time: "We're in This Together Now" is a wail of optimistic determination, and the title track ends with his repeated declaration that he "won't let you fall apart." All of which makes his eventual downfall on the album's final songs all the more tragic.

92. Elton John, Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy
It isn't his most popular album, or his most epic, or his most experimental. But Captain Fantastic is my favorite Elton John record because it's the one with the most feeling. Bernie Taupin's lyrics aren't character sketches or vague, obtuse tone poems anymore -- these songs are fiercely autobiographical, telling the story of his and Elton's rise up to the top of the pop music world. And it's exactly the kind of raw, emotional experience you'd expect, tinged with just the right amounts of nostaliga, relief and regret.

It's also really angry, though Elton's sweet melodies and blast-to-the-rafters vocals can hide that. "Someone Saved My Life Tonight" can sound, at first listen, to be a lighter-waving ballad; further analysis finds real bile in lines like "A slip noose hanging in my darkest dreams/I'm strangled by your haunted social scene." And "Tower of Babel" -- Elton makes it appear to be a standard-issue pub rocker, but Bernie's there to say "See the letches crawl with the call girls under the table/Watch 'em dig their graves." But in the end, they can't look back in anger anymore -- "Curtains" brings the album to a close by addressing the listener directly, with the notion that "just like us, you must have had your once upon a time." Sometimes those childhood dreams and fairy tales do come true.

91. Randy Newman, Good Old Boys
Some satirists aim their jokes like sniper rifles. Some like machine guns. Randy Newman manages to do both at once somehow, eviscerating people on both sides of an argument. Take this album's opening track, "Rednecks." Listen to the lyrics. Now, exactly who is he making fun of? Southerners, for being racists? Northerners, for hypocritically mocking southerners for racism while clinging to racism themselves? Southerners, for hypocritically attacking northerners for making fun of them hypocritically? The listener, for laughing at either one of them? No, the joke is somehow on everyone, everywhere, all at the same time.

Newman's a master of this, and his gifts were at their peak on Good Old Boys, a loosely-constructed song suite about life in the American south. His bouncing rhythms and sweet piano melodies are a perfect place to hide the ugliness at the bottom of a story like "Back on My Feet Again," and his ochestra is the perfect accompaniment to the pain and anguish of "Louisiana 1927." He'd write better and more popular songs, and evetually win an Oscar for one, but he'd never again put together an album with quite the impact as Good Old Boys.

90. Peter Gabriel, Us
Gabriel reacted to the success of his breakthrough pop hit, So, in a rather surprising fashion: he scored a controversial film (The Passion of the Christ), and then didn't do anything else at all for six years. By the time 1992 rolled around, most of the momentum from hits like "Sledgehammer" and "In Your Eyes" had faded, and Us didn't really make the impact on the mainstream it should have. Which is a damn shame, because Us is a stunning collection of material that doesn't really sound like anything else.

It's an intensely lonely album, beginning with an extended plea to "Come Talk to Me," and continuing through the wreckage of failed relationships in "Love to Be Loved" and "Blood of Eden." "Steam" and "Kiss That Frog" lend some pep and humor, but "Washing of the Water" is arresting in its bald-faced anguish; "Digging in the Dirt" turns that sadness into a bipolar stomp through rage and misery. But through all of that, there's Gabriel's voice, and when he finally concludes on "Secret World" that "With no guilt and no shame, no sorrow or blame/Whatever it is, we are all the same," his happy ending seems more than earned.