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Phones Laptops Headphones Cameras. Tablets Smartwatches Speakers Drones. Accessories Buying Guides How-tos Deals. Health Energy Environment. YouTube Instagram Adobe. Kickstarter Tumblr Art Club. Film TV Games. So I decided to rank the guest appearances on Donda and break them down into categories in order to separate the offensive and forgettable cameos from the moments that might make you think Kanye still has the Midas touch.
Is Donda good enough to bring him back into the light? Probably not. Of them, the most embarrassing is Marilyn Manson, who is currently facing multiple lawsuits for sexual assault. This is the most disrespectful rap resurrection since the last Pop Smoke rap resurrection. He could be revealing that a secret pot of gold is hidden right under my bed, and I probably still would have missed it. Amid the confusion over the album itself, the livestream parties offered an enticing glimpse of chaos in motion : Each listening party previewed a slightly different version of the album, with different mixes, track orders, a growing number of tracks, and different guests contributing different verses to different songs.
Da Baby has been heavily criticized for homophobic comments made during a recent Instagram Live session; Manson is currently facing lawsuits from multiple women alleging sexual assault; he has denied the allegations.
Never one to shy away from spectacle, Kanye reportedly also wanted Trump to appear onstage with him. For the final listening party, Kanye built a replica of his childhood home and then lit it completely on fire — and himself along with it. After that dramatic display came a true head-turner: Kim Kardashian, whose divorce from Kanye is not yet finalized and who has remained close to the rapper, appeared onstage with Kanye, clad in a white Balenciaga wedding gown, albeit not the same gown she wore when the couple tied the knot in Even so, the apparent wedding recreation twist spawned intense speculation about whether the couple is reconciling.
Not now , or maybe not yet? Seems complicated! It all spelled beef with a capital B — but it also potentially spelled embarrassment for one or both of the rappers. Just hours later, Kanye exhaled a primal scream of rage on Instagram, declaring UMG had released the album without his consent:. A post shared by ye kanyewest. Instead, plenty of artists are taking issue with Kanye over the final cut, most notably Soulja Boy and Chris Brown , who each had their guest verses cut from the finished product.
Critics largely seem to be exhausted by Kanye and the hype cycle that surrounds him. Many critics hate Donda and seem to be gleeful about hating Donda. Twenty-seven songs is enough to guarantee a few surefire hits for nearly every listener — enough for a few songs to satisfy most fans, even if the album feels underwhelming as a whole.
Not merely an afterthought to a studio recording, the double-LP was a testament to the power of live music and, more specifically, an advertisement for the Dead's ever-changing show. As the first in a flood of live Dead releases, it began to map out strategies for entrepreneurial juggernauts from Pearl Jam to the Dave Matthews Band, an advertisement for deeper pleasures that might only be achieved with the additional purchase of one or many concert tickets.
A path-finding moment in the pre-history of hip-hop, the debut album from this Los Angeles poetry collective — full of minimalist beats and brilliant wordplay nearly a decade before the first recorded rap song — still feels relevant 45 years later. The finest track on The Black Voices is its funniest, the eminently sample-ready, five-second salvo "The Meek Ain't Gonna" in which Hamilton explodes with the single line "The meek ain't gonna inherit shit… because I'll take it!
Never had rock music been so fussy or so technical, forgoing the pleasure of the moment for the rarefied pursuits of multi-song suites and breakdowns in time signatures no teenager would dare try to do the mashed potato alongside. For the first prog-rock LP, an Atlantic Records ad run in Rolling Stone in late claimed it featured the heaviest riffs on record since Mahler's 8th Symphony. It was a year of tumult for Stax: Otis Redding has just passed away, and their entire catalog was being absorbed by Atlantic Records.
Hayes reluctantly agreed to record another LP for Stax, with the caveat of having complete creative control — a rare opportunity for a soul musician at the time, but after Hot Buttered Soul's wild success, a necessity. It became soul music's first album-length auteur statement: four tracks spread over 45 minutes that blended pristine production, Memphis soul courtesy of the Bar-Kays, orchestral flourishes and one of the richest, bluesiest voices ever.
Rock's late-Sixties psychedelic sojourn was brought to a screeching halt with the August release of the first country-rock masterpiece, an album whose reverberations can still be heard in the hard-rocking sounds of virtually every current country hit.
The commercial success of the Eagles, America, the Doobie Brothers are all attributable to fledgling Byrd Gram Parsons's resolute belief in the cosmic power of real country music. Parsons fan Elvis Costello brought the word back to the punks on Almost Blue ; the Blasters, Long Ryders and even X added a twang to their sound; and "cowpunk" became a thing. Likewise, Uncle Tupelo's No Depression album; band spinoffs Wilco, Son Volt and Bottle Rockets; and countless subsequent alt-country advocates can all be traced back to Sweetheart.
Loretta Lynn's seventh album was named for her first Number One country hit, a feminist volley that established her persona as a country gal earthy enough to acknowledge the indignities she and her down-home sisters faced and fearless enough to stand up for herself.
There had been no-nonsense women country stars before, of course, but Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline to choose just two obvious antecedents never had a gold album. And Lynn's new commercial clout was a direct result of her songwriting talent: Her name is on the hit that anchors this album, which not only established her as a creative force but opened up new possibilities in a male-dominated market for generation of female country tunesmiths to follow, from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift.
The engineers took the heart and soul of the concept and translated it into metal designed to go like nothing else. Pepper's came out, the entire Yale and Harvard student body bought copies. Pepper's wasn't the first album to blend rock music with high art, but it was probably the first time that musicians of the Beatles' stature and popularity if there even were musicians of their stature and popularity before them decided to turn their back so completely on what had made them famous.
Put positively, it was the first time the Beatles were free of the responsibility of being the Beatles. The irony is that no other album cemented them so firmly in the public's mind. Listened to with five decades of perspective, the most shocking aspect of the Velvet Underground's debut aren't its taboo-busting songs about hard drugs and hard sex, but the songs themselves. And sometimes the noise. Traces of the album that launched a thousand bands can be found in Reed's contemporaries like David Bowie and Iggy Pop, as well as successive generations of snotty aesthetes from proto-punks, punks, post-punks and art-rockers from Jonathan Richman and Patti Smith, to R.
For the album widely considered the first commercial LP to be composed of electronic music, musician Jean-Jacques Perrey's synthesizer prowess was harnessed by arranger Gershon Kingsley's pop sensibilities. They positioned themselves as nothing less than messengers from the future: "Here is the electronic 'Au Go Go' that might be heard soon from the juke boxes at the interplanetary way stations where spaceships make their rest stops," read the liner notes.
As it turned out, they were right. Well, not about the spaceship rest stops, but about what giddy, playful compositions like "Electronic Can-Can" and "Computer In Love" presaged — namely, a future where Daft Punk and Dr.
Luke defined the parameters as much as any axe-wielding rocker, thanks to the Moog, the Ondioline and their digital descendants being just as likely to create chart-topping hits as guitars. Released in June , Frank Zappa's major-label debut was only rock's second double album Bob Dylan released Blonde on Blonde a month earlier but it set a higher bar for conceptual audacity.
A sardonic, satirical, weirdly entertaining predecessor to kitchen-sink productions such as Sgt. Pop parodies like "Wowie Zowie" may not necessarily stand the test of time, but Zappa's tribal frenzies and consumerist parodies hey there, "Weird Al" resonate still.
P et Sounds' emotional ambiguities and rich arrangements brought a through-line of maturity to the adolescent fun, fun, fun of early rock. The influence of Pet Sounds' huge palette of strings, horns, accordions, mandolins, vibraphones and harmonies could be heard almost instantly, not least via Beach Boys super-fan Paul McCartney, who said that "God Only Knows" spurred the Beatles' Sgt.
A primo reference point for Radiohead, Nick Drake, My Bloody Valentine and anyone else looking to evoke the eternal teenage bedroom of the mind. The Beatles didn't stop touring till the summer of , but a year earlier, on Rubber Soul , you can hear them deciding to make the recording studio their home. The harmonies were trickier, the recording techniques more considered, and the instrumentation more varied as the band expanded upon the standard rock band format they'd established.
Maybe the sitar stood out the most at the time, but dig all those pianos, often electronically tweaked, most notably to impersonate a harpsichord on "In My Life. You can say this represents "maturity," call it "art" or credit it for moving rock away from singles to album-length statements — but regardless Rubber Soul accelerated popular music's creative arms race, driving competitors like the Stones, the Beach Boys and Dylan to dismantle expectations and create new ones.
Here is where white American kids got the notion they could play the blues. This Chicago quintet featured two stunning guitarists in Elvin Bishop and Mike Bloomfield — the latter, an early version of the skills-centric "guitar hero" model.
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