Vinyl Me, Please

100 Albums You Need in Your Collection

Vinyl Me Please

• Publisher: Abrams Image
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781419725975
• eBook ISBN: 9781683350866
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica

Brought to you by the subscription club of the same name, Vinyl Me, Please: 100 Albums You Need In Your Collection is a vibrant visual guide to curating must-have records for any music lover's shelf. Celebrating artists as varied and influential as Bikini Kill, Aretha Franklin, Wilco, and beyond, each entry includes an album's artwork, a short essay from a contributing music writer, and further suggestions to help you expand your taste and build your collection. This sleek compendium even includes recipes for possible cocktail pairings to complete your listening experience. Perfect for both new collectors and die-hard wax-spinners, Vinyl Me, Please revels in the album as art form and exudes the style, expertise, and passion that all crate-diggers share.

A-D

Ryan Adams

Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force

Arcade Fire

The Band

The Beach Boys

Beach House

Beastie Boys

The Beatles

Beck

Beyoncé

Big Star

Bikini Kill

The Black Keys

James Blake

Bon Iver

The Books

David Bowie

Burial

Captain Beefheart & his Magic Band

The Chills

The Clash

Clipse

John Coltrane

D’Angelo

Daft Punk

Miles Davis

Def Leppard

Dirty Projectors

DJ Shadow

The Doobie Brothers

Nick Drake

Bob Dylan

RYAN ADAMS
LIVE AT CARNEGIE HALL

by Luke Winkie

When all’s said and done, Ryan Adams might have the most ridiculous career in the history of pop music. Rollicking Whiskeytown Ryan Adams; sad-boy derelict Heartbreaker Ryan Adams; Grammy-nominated, “New York, New York”–era Gold Ryan Adams; slightly infuriating “Wonderwall”-covering weirdo Ryan Adams; divergent, heavy-metal, are-we-sure-he’s-okay Ryan Adams, and of course the equally divergent, Taylor Swift–covering, aren’t-we-lucky-to-have-him Ryan Adams. He’s released 15 albums, written two books, left one insane voicemail, and has worn out countless jean jackets. It’s occasionally not been easy being a Ryan Adams fan, but it’s certainly never been boring. I suppose that’s all you can ask for.

On the other side of our last 15 years with Ryan Adams, we have a man who seems happy, artistically fulfilled, and big enough to play Carnegie Hall. The album cover artwork captures this neatly: Adams’s rapt audience packing out the vast hall; the man himself hovering between the shadows and the spotlight. That’s what you get on Live at

Carnegie Hall: 42 tracks spanning two nights in the winter of 2014; just Ryan, his guitar, harmonica, and honeysuckle voice. Stripping everything down to an equal level, dodging his more polarizing work, and giving fans what they want. And you know what? Not a lot of people on earth can step to an opening triptych like “Oh My Sweet Carolina,” “My Winding Wheel,” and “Dirty Rain.”

The vinyl release of Live at Carnegie Hall is particularly handsome—a box set spanning six 180-gram records, imbued with all the ultra-limited fetishistic qualities that make collecting a worthy hobby. And while it might not be the definitive Ryan Adams suite (like it or not, you have to include albums like 29 and Orion in the biography), it might be the Ryan Adams I enjoy the most. Calm, peaceful, and actually kind of funny. “I would assume many of you, probably like 86 percent of you, are on Paxil, so you understand about depression,” he says during one particularly inspired bit of banter. “You’re at a fucking Ryan Adams show, you know what I mean?”

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Ryan Adams
Heartbreaker

Bob Dylan
Blood on the Tracks

Whiskeytown
Pneumonia

AFRIKA BAMBAATAA & SOULSONIC FORCE
PLANET ROCK: THE ALBUM

by Gary Suarez

Like so many members of hip-hop’s first wave, Afrika Bambaataa came up during an era of gang factionalism and violent turf wars in New York City. A South Bronx native, he rose in the ranks of the Black Spades to become a warlord, a powerful title charged with some obvious responsibilities and duties. In the wake of 1971’s historic Hoe Avenue Peace Meeting and that street summit’s resultant treaty, Bambaataa built what would become a unifying, more peaceable organization ultimately dubbed the Universal Zulu Nation.

DJ Kool Herc’s legendary parties brought everyone together regardless of affiliation, prompting the former warlord to pursue his own musical path (though the Afrofuturist artwork on the cover gives a nod to Bambaataa’s warrior status). With co-production by dance-music pioneers Arthur Baker and John Robie, “Planet Rock” drew from Kraftwerk and Yellow Magic Orchestra to make something undeniably hip-hop, fusing two nascent genres in the process. A milestone in modern music history, the track was followed by the electro anthems “Looking for the Perfect Beat” and “Renegades of Funk,” making for a potent trio of early 1980s singles.

With seminal funk collaborations “Frantic Situation” with Shango, and “Go Go Pop” with Trouble Funk, Planet Rock: The Album is more than mere compilation, but a veritable Rosetta Stone for understanding late 20th-century American music. Much like George Clinton’s Parliament-Funkadelic saw their vision expand and multiply with the masses, these Soulsonic Force records aided in spearheading genre and cultural movements they didn’t necessarily even intend.

Detroit-techno originator Juan Atkins derived inspiration from Bambaataa’s work, in turn producing masterful Afrofuturist music of his own as Model 500 and other monikers. Bambaataa’s records like “Looking for the Perfect Beat” ushered in not only the 1980s electro scene but also the urban Latino sound known as Freestyle. Without Bambaataa, a teenaged Andre Young might never have become Dr. Dre, whose work as part of World Class Wreckin’ Cru and on early N.W.A. cuts like “Panic Zone” owes a great deal to Bambaataa’s vital template. For that latter example alone, Planet Rock: The Album merits replay after replay.

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Eric B. & Rakim
Paid in Full

Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five
The Message

Kool Moe Dee
Kool Moe Dee

ARCADE FIRE
NEON BIBLE

by Levi J Sheppard and Joshua Lingenfelter

In early 2007, the news of a follow-up to Arcade Fire’s breakout release was everywhere. At the time, Arcade Fire had already amassed such a high level of critical acclaim from Funeral that everyone wanted to know if they could measure up to expectations. Fans could anticipate something dark, but no one knew which direction Win Butler would focus his gaze. Before the album hit shelves, the band went on a short concert tour of churches in Ottawa, Montreal, London, and New York City, a setting that was altogether appropriate and ironic. Like the experience of listening to the album, it felt like something sacred.

Funeral was universally accepted, in spite of—or perhaps thanks to—its dark and depressing themes of personal loss; Neon Bible takes the listener in a different direction, defiantly exploring personal and political issues—showing believable desperation in Butler’s voice when he sings, “I don’t wanna work in a building downtown” on “(Antichrist Television Blues).” The songs vary in tempo and intensity, but they all stand as expressions of discontentment and rebellion. In the echo of the tragic tones of Funeral, Neon Bible moves sadness further up the emotional scale to anger, while still holding on to hopefulness. The subject matter of the songs has as much to prove to the listener as the band did to the music industry upon the album’s release.

Here, the Bible is neon because the worship of advertising and materialism has become commonplace. This image serves to epitomize what this album is asking of the listener: to see the truth behind the bright lights. It’s a cathartic experience; a shelter from the pressures and absurdities of modern life; somewhere to feel consoled and to take comfort in the confessions of another; a place to get angry and then to feel the relief of finding that, outside your own windowsill, things might not be so bleak. Solidifying Arcade Fire’s reputation as being an honest band that sings about serious and urgent topics—a reputation that has continued to evolve well beyond the limits of their breakout efforts—Neon Bible is an album that proved Arcade Fire could still mine the depths of the well, for the purpose of lifting us to the lighthouse.

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Islands
Return to the Sea

Talking Heads
Fear of Music

Wolf Parade
At Mount Zoomer

THE BAND
MUSIC FROM BIG PINK

by Jes Skolnik

Big Pink is a real house (yes, with siding the color of cotton candy) in West Saugerties, New York, not that far from Woodstock. It’s where Bob Dylan and The Band (then Hawks, the band that backed him on his infamous 1965–6 electric tour) would write and record what would become The Basement Tapes while Dylan recovered from his notorious motorcycle accident. It was where The Band began to find their own independent voice, where they composed much of the lovingly named Music from Big Pink (for which Dylan produced the bright, naïve cover art).

Growing up the daughter of erudite hippies who are both musicians themselves, Music from Big Pink loomed large in my childhood. The album, which bridges nearly every genre popular with my parents’ cohort at that time (rock, country, and folk, with bluesy R&B arrangements), didn’t sound terribly unique or interesting to my young ears. It wasn’t until I started reading about Dylan and The Band in my parents’ basement library of ’60s and ’70s rock journalism that I realized that Music from Big Pink had had such an inexorable impact on so much of the “classic rock” that had come after it—Clapton’s post-Cream bands, Pink Floyd, and so forth—that I was collapsing the experimental history-making template into everything it had influenced.

There’s “This Wheel’s on Fire,” a Dylan-penned basement song that offers ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Contributors
• Introduction
• A-D
• E-L
• M-R
• S-Z
• Index of Searchable Terms
• Picture Credits
• Afterword
• Acknowledgments
• Copyright Page