The Immortals #86 - 2Pac Shakur

Okay, confession time: I'd never heard a 2Pac song before sitting down to write this post.

Despite being, ostensibly, his core audience (a white, suburban high school freshman in southern California) when his post-incarceration magnum opus, All Eyez On Me was released, rocketing him to pop superstardom, I somehow managed to completely miss the phenomena. I was just old enough to be turning off MTV, and the once-venerable Los Angeles rock radio institution KROQ-FM had not yet completed its hellish devolution into a Clearchannel atrocity. And I never got invited to parties or had any fun ever. I had a vague familiarity with "California Love" through cultural osmosis, and I knew to attribute the phrase "picture me rollin'" to his track of the same name, but otherwise I managed to live to the ripe old age of 27 years old before becoming acquainted with the works of Mr. Tupac Amaru Shakur.

And I'm sorry, you guys, but I just do not get it.

Now, it's true that I'm the biggest hip-hop guy, but I'm far from a neophyte. I've got love for most of the genre's other entrants on Rolling Stone's "Immortals" list, and a bunch of other fairly "mainstream" acts like Eric B, and Rakim, Public Enemy, The Pharcyde, Boogie Down Productions/KRS-ONE, and A Tribe Called Quest- all have all seen some play in my collection (to name but a few...) But more important than my credentials (or relative lack thereof) is that 2Pac provides us with our first opportunity to address rap and hip-hop's inclusion by RS' parade of experts and legends as ostensibly belonging naturally within some broad interpretation of the rock and roll milieu.

Put flatly, it is incredibly dismissive of perhaps the most culturally significant musical movement of the latter half of the 20th century, despite the fact that RS' decision could charitably be taken as an intended compliment to hip-hop, that it's greatest artists are every bit as important as those from "plain old" rock and roll. But this gesture is wholly misguided, and ultimately as equally great an implied insult to the titans of jazz (and, arguably, giants of country and soul musics as well) who were not seen as deserving recognition in the world of rock music in its "first 50 years."

The six hip-hop artists who made the top 100 (four of whom are clustered between spots #75 and #86) represent a plot on behalf of Rolling Stone that could be taken as token reference at best and grotesquely commercial at worst- an slight that stings all the greater when considering that such a middling a talent as 2Pac managed to end up occupying a space that could have otherwise gone to John Coltrane or Willie Nelson (or hell, even Garth Brooks! I mean, the dude sold a bazillion fucking records, right?) But no, the "masterminds" behind the Immortals project saw fit to incorporate an overwhelmingly popular (and profitable) part of their magazine's coverage since the late 1980s with a transparent attempt to play it off as a tribute from rock and roll to hip-hop that really does neither any service, ultimately.

So why 2Pac? Well, for a lot of the reasons that Gram Parsons (our #87) is here, quite frankly. If any rapper's personal mythology ever overwhelmed the quality of his art, it was Shakur's. The oft-sung ballad of the thug-poet with who embodied such fake dynamic tensions as being "hard edged" with a "gentle soul" has somehow not been undone in the almost 15 years following his death in a senseless act of life-imitating-music-industry-created-hype, as if nobody checked the wiki and took note that the dude was a dancer with the Digital Underground (a far more honest and entertaining venture than anything from 'Pac's own recording career- "Samoans!"), or that nobody ever played the childish media games of glamorizing gang violence more egregiously.

Instead, we somehow remember him as the profligate free spirit who was lost before his time, leaving us with nothing but his interminable hours of uninspired teenage bullshit spewn across tracks so utterly unremarkable as to border on... nothing. They're fucking boring. I just listened to an hour of this two-disc Greatest Hits thing, and I can't even think of a comparison that wouldn't make his music sound like some other thing that's far more interesting and worthy of anybody's time.

Were I so inclined play this as an insult to hip-hop, I would point to 2Pac as the ultimate triumph of persona over substance, but that really isn't any more uniquely warranted a criticism as could be equally applied to 60 years of pop music, so fuck it. Instead I'll pay a specific (and ultimately far more damning) insult to Shakur for his inexplicable legions of fans to suffer: You already know that if you hadn't been shot, you'd have gotten as old and pathetic as Elvis did at the end, but you know what else?

Biggie wouldn't have.

Yeah, that's right. You thought I'd write something about 'Pac that did the favor of not mentioning him? Well I didn't. Because as long as we're humoring this little exercise and including rappers on the list, Biggie was just one of a great many artists who deserved to be here more than you.

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Modern Library Top 100: #94 - Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Around the same time a few white kids in your typical suburban high school--my typical suburban high school, weirdly enough--rallied around the American flag to say they weren't too fond of a multiracial America, thank you very much, I was turning the final page on Jean Rhys's celebrated meditation on racial identity. I doubt any of those boys has read Wide Sargasso Sea, but I'm sure they would find it instructive. It's as racist as they are.

Jean Rhys first read Jane Eyre as a teenager, and was appalled at the revolting portrayal of Bertha Mason, the Jamaican creole madwoman banished to the attic of Thornfield Hall. A creole herself, Rhys decided to give Bertha her due, writing a prequel of sorts describing Bertha's youth as white girl growing up in Jamaica in the wake of emancipation. Rhys does her best to rehabilitate Mason's image, along the way tackling BIG ISSUES like the existential anguish of being in a economically dominant minority, or the pain of growing up in a nice big house that's falling apart because your mother couldn't afford to pay her former slaves enough to keep it up. And why are all the black people so mean to Bertha (here called Antoinette) anyway? The horror!

So no, I did not like this novel. To be charitable, Rhys is definitely on point vis-a-vis Victorian gender relations. She does a very good job of painting Antoinette's husband as the domineering weasel who effectively forces her into madness, his appropriation of her so complete that he even succeeds in renaming her. (Not that complete, of course, because she does eventually burn his house down in Jane Eyre. But still). But woo boy, nobody would accuse Rhys of being racially sensitive (except, of course, sensitive to the plight of white people).

Christophine, the principal black person in the novel, is a wise old woman who practices voodoo, and shepherds Antoinette throughout the narrative. She's the very definition of the magical negro, and she's just as offensive as Uncle Remus. Sandi Cosway is another black person who pops up, and he happens to be the love of Antoinette's life. He arrives for a single page to save her from a schoolyard beating, then disappears entirely from the story for his trouble. But hey, we're at least told that Sandi and Antoinette were engaged, so that's....something, I guess. The rest of the black characters either burn down Antoinette's childhood home, steal her clothes, kill her brother, call her names, or seduce her husband. Some critics have defended Rhys's portrayal of black Jamaicans, since the story is told from the point of view of a 19th century genteel Creole woman, reflecting what would have been her feelings on race. Bullfeathers, I say.

Anyway, I guess the point of this all is that it really shouldn't be so hard to step outside yourself and write a sympathetic fully-realized character outside your own experience. But for whatever reason people keep fucking it up. I've long railed against Hollywood's (a collection of white men if there ever was one) treatment of women as either baby-crazy psychopaths (I'm looking at you, Judy Greer) or bland objects of adolescent desire (oh hi, Zooey Deschanel!). And obviously it's not just about gender. Going back a wee bit further, Robinson Crusoe's boy Friday wasn't exactly a positive step forward in race relations.

So maybe I shouldn't be so harsh on Wide Sargasso Sea. It's just another pearl in a necklace of failure. And besides, it's not a total drag. But if it's one of the best novels of the 20th Century, we deserve better.

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The Immortals #87 - Gram Parsons

The "Whatever That Is" Immortals post.

(Props if you got that reference.)

I'll admit to being moderately annoyed that this entry is not simply for The Flying Burrito Brothers. It's true that Chris Hillman will get his props in another entry much further down on this list, and that there is no single figure more closely associated with his referred musical style on this side of the nearest Urban Outfitters, but still- doesn't this just sort of smack of aggrandizement? Almost nowhere in the annals of his discography does he achieve anything of note without significant collaborative effort.

Sweetheart of the Rodeo, the final Byrds LP and often cited as the first "country-rock" album, was dominated by Roger McGuinn while his first two albums with the Flying Burrito Bros (a band name he outright stole from his old International Submarine Band-mates), The Guilded Palace of Sin and Burrito Deluxe, were all-star efforts featuring the talents of former Byrds Hillman and Michael Clarke along with incomparable efforts from bassist Chris Ethridge and pedal steel guitarist "Sneaky" Pete Kleinow. And as the Burritos continued to make underrated records following Parsons' departure, Gram made a couple of records with no less a talented co-star than the young Miss Emmylou Harris; records that went nowhere until, decades after his overdose, they were dusted off as a hipster cause célèbre and credited for kick-starting the alt country craze that began in earnest in the 1990s.

Parsons' mythology has almost certainly outpaced any legitimate claim he might have had to being the "godfather" of alt country. Apart from the incalculable influence of the outsider country sounds made in Bakersfield and Lubbock in the mid-20th century, there were simply too many credible revivalists of folk, rock, blues and Appalachian musics to essentialize as any sort of cohesive "movement" under the patronage of a rich-born, Harvard-educated Southern boy who played with some good bands once he moved to LA.

Yet we know more about Gram than practically any of the other supposed originators of alt country, and a large part of me suspects that it's because he's just so damned easy to glamorize. He was credited years after his early passing as an unheralded genius. He had fascinating, idiosyncratic interests UFOs, Joshua Tree, rodeo tailoring and casual narcotics usage. And it certainly never hurt that he was always the cutest boy in any room he walked into. He was the genuine, original indie idol. Hell, he was even predisposed to calling his particular take on country, folk, gospel and rock as "cosmic American music", making him the original "whatever that is" alt-pedagogue. I mean, not to diminish all the excellent music that he played in his too-short 26 years, but did any other musician benefit as much from the live fast, die young school of rock legacy-making as Gram?

Still. There's something to idol-worship... isn't there?

Glorious Noise recently pointed to a section of The Observer's press for a new Rolling Stones documentary that made note of the closeness of Mick and Gram:

"Keith and Gram were intimate like brothers, especially musically. The idea was floating around that Gram would produce a Gram Parsons album for the newly formed Rolling Stones Records. Mick, I think, was a little afraid because that would mean that Gram and Keith might even tour together to promote it. And if there is no room for Mick, there is no room also for the Rolling Stones."

My favorite piece of Burrito Bros. trivia is that it was they, and not the Stones, who first recorded and released a version of the Richards/Jagger composition "Wild Horses." The story goes that, during their prolonged European bro-down, Keith played a demo of the song for Gram, and Parsons flipped for it and insisted that he be allowed to record it with for the Burritos' second album, which wound up being released a year before Sticky Fingers. The result is, blasphemy be damned, my favorite version of my favorite Stones song.

Three years later, he'd be dead, and he wasn't even really famous yet.

What if indeed...

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The Immortals #88 - Miles Davis

In Murray Lerner's Miles Electric: A Different Kind of Blue, there's a moment in which percussionist James Mtume argues that Miles Davis' move to fusion and "jazz-rock" (a term that everybody seems as loathe to accept as I was to type it) was a natural progression by one of the 20th century's greatest musical innovators:

Look man, when the temperance scale was created- the 440- that was the synthesizer of its time. I'm sure there was some harpsichord players walking around talking about "they're not keeping it real..."

In the same film, jazz critic and noted cantankerous old crank Stanley Crouch had a different take:

That's bullshit. That's all part of the "Miles Davis" myth. Miles Davis was trying to make some money.

Is it too much of a cop-out to say that they were both right?

Rolling Stone's list of "The Immortals" includes more than one artist whose work was quite conspicuously not, or not really, of rock and roll or its tributary genres. We'll get to the assembled rappers and crossover stars as we try to reconcile those musics' place in "rock" history in just a little while, but sneaking a peak at what's to come, we note a peculiar absence of homage to any artists from that most uniquely American of all art forms: jazz. In fact, only one artist appears on this list that is more widely associated with jazz, and he's on here for the work that most conspicuously got him labeled as a sellout and rejected by true jazz fans. Not that he cared.

See, the truth is that Miles Davis was kind of a little fucker.

There's little to dispute that Miles did more for jazz in his six decades-long career (and particularly the thirty years spanning 1945 to 1975) than perhaps any single performer, bandleader, composer, or producer. He ushered his form into more new styles in more new eras than anybody, and had the virtuoso chops to back up every accolade he ever earned or should have earned. But for all his meaningful innovation and pure, unadulterated musical brilliance, Davis wasn't getting rich as a middle-aged jazzer. Nobody pays their rent in respect.

Add in to the equation that Miles had recently married the new Mrs. Betty Davis, a firebrand funk/soul singer who introduced him to a few spiritual soulmates in the music of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The psychedelic sounds of acid-soul and zeroed-out funk inspired Miles, always restless and ready to push the boundaries of whatever came next, to plug in and riff, an event that might have ranked with Dylan at Newport in 1965, if not for the fact that, yeah, Miles was kinda-sorta hoping to cross over to the new generation of kids and hopefully make some real dough.

The results owed more than a little to his influences. Davis would later credit entire riffs from A Tribute to Jack Johnson and Big Fun (compiled mostly from his On the Corner outtakes) to Hendrix and Sly, lifted wholesale and warped beyond recognition by collaborators like Herbie Hancock, Joe Zawinul, Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey, Tony Williams, and Airto Moreira, to name just a few. And while his live shows in the 1970s were uncompromisingly hard-edged and disputatious of the core audience who had followed him from jazz to... whatever this was, his records in that era were meticulously constructed from take after labyrinthine take, jam after endless jam in post-production to create his finished products. Be it "jazz" or not, the mercurial mixture was composed with an ear for something Miles specifically wanted his audience to hear, even if they didn't get it.

I'm not sure I get it, either. Listening to Bitches Brew for the first time revealed little more than dissonance for broad, almost interminable stretches, even having been primed in 2010 by my first adult excursions into jazz appreciation. I've trained on Coleman and Dolphy and Zorn, at least a little, but I'd be hard-pressed to explain what exactly was going on here beyond the fact that the pianos were electric. And while Bitches Brew is, for whatever reasons, heralded as the masterwork of "Miles Electric", I'd argue that there are far more examples of greater significance on his other big albums of this era for both impressions on jazz and rock musics.

On the Corner and Big Fun are terrific, freaky cousins to Curtis Mayfield, late-period Temptations, and Sly's There's A Riot Goin' On. Live-Evil bounces like a more propulsive Funkadelic, and would fit neatly on the shelf next to Maggot Brain (another 1971 classic.) And In a Silent Way contains more accessibly beautiful moments than arguably much of his "traditional" jazz works since he and Gil Evans interpreted Gershwin on Porgy and Bess.

And while Lerner's documentary would have you believe that Davis' electric work was most meaningful to lame jam bands, the sonic scope of what he achieved in these diversions had profound and far-reaching impacts on everything that came after it (Eno's Another Green World alone ties Miles to most of modern alternative music in six degrees or less.)

And that's pretty damned cool. Even if Stanley Crouch (and I) would rather listen to 'Round Midnight or Live at Newport 1958 again instead.

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The Immortals #89 - The Yardbirds

It's telling that I couldn't find any "definitive" Yardbirds record to listen to when preparing this entry. The band is best known for being a significant presence in the early "British Invasion" of 60s rock and for having a membership that included Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, and Jimmy Page- all of whom would go on to become much more famous for making much better music of much greater importance in the immediate future.

A run through this Yardbirds compilation's track list displays that the band failed to be a legitimate showcase for those celebrated musicians as either guitarists or songwriters. Like so many great bands of their time, they made their name on covers that interpreted American rock, soul and blues through the filter of white English kids with good taste in fashion, some fairly exotic instrumentation, and the desperate need to lay pipe for better careers to come.

(It's an old writer's term. Look it up.)

There are some kickin' tracks on here, especially the barbed wire whip of "Heart Full of Soul" and the justly-renowned "For Your Love", but both of those were written by the dude from 10cc. If Clapton, the Jeff Beck Group, and Led Zeppelin were going to eventually reinvent rock and roll into their own versions of drug-fuled power riffage (Clapton), heavy fusion (Beck), and... ummm... just a really kick-ass, turned-to-eleven version of the Yardbirds (Page), they were going to have to start at an earlier link in its evolutionary chain.

But unlike peers like the Beatles, Stones, and Kinks, the Yardbirds didn't go forward to do their best, most universe-altering work as a unified whole. And so now "The Yardbirds" are frozen in time, the greatest of the British Invasion acts not to mutate into something else, the embodiment of a sort of adolescent stage in rock's development.

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The Immortals #90 - Carlos Santana

Santana is lot like Jimi Hendrix, if Hendrix had only been about as nonthreatening as a plate of refried beans.

Was that racist?

In 1999, Santana released the mega-selling collaborations album Supernatural, featuring such enduring creative powerhouses as Rob Thomas (he was in Matchbox 20!), Eagle-Eye Cherry (his name is all nouns!), and Everlast (he wrote "Jump Around!") This made him the most popular middle-aged Mexican in the world, a title he held until the rise of George Lopez. Maybe Supernatural was the record I should have studied for this series. It was probably the most representative document from his entire career of everything Santana's music really is: comfortably re-tread classic rock, uninspired-but-pleasant virtuoso leads, and tasteful cameo-whoring, all dressed up with a "muy caliente" Latin flair that'll have you running for the border.

I might have read that last thing from a packet of Taco Bell hot sauce.

Supernatural is exactly the kind of record you want to make when you're old and boring and waiting for some lifetime achievement recognition, and a fitting tribute to a man who personified the phrase "popular recording artist." But I didn't pick Supernatural for this entry, opting instead for Santana's sacred and time-tested "best" record, Abraxis. And you know what? It's lame.

It's telling that Santana's enduring classic only contains two original compositions. He doesn't really have much of an original voice or point of view beyond wanting to play electric guitar over traditional Latin inspired standards. I suppose it's nice that in his way, Santana's popularization of more diverse instrumentation in rock informed some of the better diversions into world music in later decades. And hey, a pre-Bonnaroo culture of blacklight poster enthusiasts needed something to listen to until Phish came around, right?

I can see why this sold a ton of records. Despite its illusion of exoticism, it's blandly palatable to seemingly any audience. And while it's non-challenging, it's also not an entirely unpleasant score for any number of background music needs. But I can't just sit down and actually listen to the whole record today without it really just making me want to listen Jimi, or Fleetwood Mac, or Tito Puente or Can instead. Or maybe eat some chips and salsa.

Mmmmm... chips and salsa.

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The Immortals #91 - Ricky Nelson

You might hear the name "Ricky Nelson" and think of the spoiled, talentless offspring whose terrible music was only popularized for his ability to be a televised proxy of famous parents. But you're actually thinking of his kids.

Ricky Nelson's career was notably discredited his lineage through much of his adult life, but the posthumous recognition he's seen for his place as not only the original teen idol but one of the first great rock stars is deserved. His wasn't a music career born of contrivance, like, say, David Cassidy's, but the result of an actual talent that just happened to grow up on TV.

That doesn't change the fact that in the beginning (for white people anyway) there was Elvis, and there was Ricky Nelson. Where Elvis' aping of rockabilly leaned more heavily on rhythm and blues of the delta, Nelson mixed similar influences with an overt and unabashed pop sensibility. And he wrote a couple of plain amazing songs for it.

Go listen to "Travelin' Man" right now. Go ahead.

But all the modern praise for Nelson is probably a bit overstated. In truth, he wouldn't have made my top 100, and his legacy benefited from an age-old biopic plot device: he died suddenly and tragically, and in a plane crash to boot. There aren't many better bonafides for to admittance to rock and roll Heaven than that.

And hey, he died. So let's just let him have it, yeah?

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The Immortals #92 - Guns N' Roses

Way back in January, the erstwhile co-authors of this site and myself made a road trip from southern California to Las Vegas, Nevada. Each of us being inveterate gamblers (untrue) and borderline problem drinkers (closer to true), the neon capital of the world called to us Hustlers for an off-season weekend of wandering the strip, seeing the sights, and intermittent gaming heightened by the thrill of undeserved "free" drinks carried by Eastern European-born waitresses.

A particularly memorable moment came on our second proper evening in town as we approached the gleaming casinos from our borrowed timeshared condo on the outskirts of tourist-land. Popping a disc into the car stereo, the intro started with an echoed, clanging guitar lick, followed by snaking high-hat... I made sure to carefully time the music with our left hand turn onto Las Vegas Blvd, cruising in time for the climactic "Cha!"

Welcome to the Jungle, baby.

It might have been the highlight of the whole weekend.

Except that it wasn't.
If memory serves, we turned the stereo back down before the first bridge. Why? Because it's 2009 and we're neither strippers nor professional wrestlers- who the fuck wants to listen to Guns N' Roses?

In 1987, it's not too hard to imagine why this was considered "revolutionary." Compared to all the other hair-obsessed pop metal bands popularized by Guns' own hometown Sunset scene, Axl, Slash, Duff, Izzy and Steven were about as badass as could be. Never mind that they were themselves just as hair-obsessed and poppy as any of their counterparts- Guns felt different, back then anyway.

To be fair, Slash plays electric guitar quite well, and Izzy/Duff both helped craft several tracks into catchy hits. Axl was surely compelling (if not particularly charismatic.) There's a reason that Appetite for Destruction has been so much longer-lived than albums by Guns' contemporaries. It is, on the whole, a solid 40% better than most of the excrement it can be compared to from its era. It was 1987 and mainstream music sucked. In fact, I could have been a whole lot more fair to Guns and picked the noble failure of Use Your Illusion, with its high points offering glimpses of actual nuance in Rose's persona and- dare I say it?- talent, even. But Appetite is the record they/he will forever be known and celebrated for, plus it sold a a million bajillion copies, so good on them.

And so it was that Guns N' Roses was perhaps the biggest band in the world for a glorious 4 years of excess and undeserved acclaim from people with shitty taste. And then along came Nevermind. Although technically true that Nirvana knocked Michael Jackson's last good record off the top of the charts (Dangerous- RESPECT), it wasn't the end of the King of Pop, who enjoyed another good 5 or so years of absolute peak popularity worldwide. Rather, it was Guns N' Roses who were relegated to a distant 2nd place in the world of rock music, soon to be outpaced by dozens of less-than-Nirvana grunge and grunge-imitators (and then eventually by Nirvana again with Kurt Cobain's 1994 suicide.)

During the long wait for (and following the inevitable failure of) Chinese Democracy GN'R became more sideshow than legend. The creatively valid members of the band left and/or got fired, Axl challenged Jacko to a race for who could descend into freaky cult-figure status and social irrelevance the fastest (sadly, Axl lost again- nobody beats the King), and their fanbase waited, dwindled, and eventually realized that Fred Durst was a reasonable enough facsimile for their lost messiah. By the time of Democracy's release late last year, it was little more than an afterthought on a career that all but the douchiest of males had forgotten. The transparency of Rose' cashgrab was almost insulting- you could only buy the record at Best Buy in the US, and there was even a Dr. Pepper tie-in!

Guns feel today like a band that were never more than the sum of their parts: Crazy redheaded controversy magnet, stoner icon with a cheap fashion gimmick, bass player from a "real" music city and not fake-old Los Angeles, a drummer who repped "punk" to people who don't know shit about T.S.O.L., and at least one guitarist with an awesome nickname (I refer, of course, to "Izzy." What kind of name is "Slash?" I mean REALLY...)

That sense of hollowness was only heightened by the decade-plus that Axl Spent bloating its lineup with as many potentially notable names as possible, including actual notables like guitar-noodling demigod Buckethead, session super-man Josh Freese, and Tommy "I Was in the Fucking Replacements!" Stinson. Now you can see Guns N' Roses on their periodic tours for a couple hundred bucks. The venues they play are surely better than whatever state fair Ratt is gigging next summer... but by how much?

Well, they're #92 on the "Immortals" list, so I guess the upside is that I get to take potshots at them for eternity. In fact, the picture for this entry was very nearly one of Kurt Cobain himself, from the famous "Where's Axl" scuffle backstage at the 1992 Video Music Awards (the same telecast that yielded a memorable Guns duet with Elton John on "November Rain.")

Why?

Because fuck you, Axl.

You lose again.

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The Immortals #93 - Booker T. And The MG's

Too much is made of their being an integrated band. Recognition for their monumental importance as the house band at Stax, a fine bit of historical revisionism. Their sound? Overestimated. And that's a shame, because they really should be loved for exactly what they were.

First, addressing the obvious- they had no vocalist. One of only 2 entrants in the Immortals list not to have featured a singer. But, at the risk of sounding an apologist, I'd posit that the organ and guitar on those records were a duo worthy of mention alongside any fronting duo in rock history. And I don't mean Booker T. Jones and Steve Cropper, not the men or how they played those instruments/parts- that's an important distinction. I mean that the organ and the guitar on those records were Mick and Keith, John and Paul... or maybe more appropriately Sam and Dave. Even backing Wilson Pickett or Eddie Floyd, the instrumental track itself always seemed to present another frontman and sidekick, commanding the listener up front in the mix.

It's good that they had their effect on other people's records, because they released precious few compositions of their own (the landmark Green Onions contains a mere 3 original tunes.) Most if Onions is composed of reproductions of songs they'd already fleshed-out on other people's records, and yeah, it's sort of impossible not to prefer the originals we know and love. That's not to say that it isn't a sheer pleasure to listen to Booker T. and the boys- that title track is utterly un-improvable. But it would frankly be a lot easier to overlook the fact of their own songs' scarcity if it didn't highlight a suspicion you get listening to the MG's: that in a few records-worth of material, they could have ended up so much more than extras for the Akroyd/Landis canon.

In another universe they might have been the Animals (if never the Stones): remembered for their lasting influence but also beneficiaries of an era of mania that let them cash in while they were young enough to enjoy it. Instead, they get the distinction of being imitated in modern music just as often as they're sampled outright, a more obscured legacy (though certainly one of honor itself.) Maybe that's all fitting, just as well for the world's best backing band.

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The Immortals #94 - Nine Inch Nails

Nine Inch Nails are the most popular "industrial rock" band of all time. So yeah, Trent Reznor got famous, but just technically.

No era of popular music was ever as accepting of naked emotional release as the 1990s, but as the grunge boom snowballed out of control, we lost our sense for deciding quality from insistence, meaning any two-bit lump could and would be signed to a multi-record deal worth many major label millions for our eagerness to confuse earnestness with talent. This would be taken to even further extremes (bordering on the grotesque and/or humorous) in the early 2000s with nu-metal and emo ascendant, but in 1994, that shit was juuust about to ripen. And so, after a modestly successful (but only cautiously embraced) also-ran debut called Pretty Hate Machine, Nine Inch Nails was ready set the new curve.

The resulting album, The Downward Spiral, feels pretty transparently like exactly the record Steve Albini and Brian Eno's hyperneurotic trust fund kid would make. And not really in a cool way, but I fully get how it would have been taken that way 15 years ago.

In hindsight, I think the most compelling thing about the album today- like so much about the alternative/industrial genres- are its peripheral associations. No matter how schlocky Mark Romanek's video for "Closer" seems in a post-Saw-franchise-society, the truth is it's actually every bit as vital as the song for most of us, and probably more. Johnny Cash had a knack for stealing the songs he covered by virtue of the indelible, unmistakable mark he left on the source material, but I think we can all tell that he had an easier time of it elevating album-closer "Hurt" by virtue of the patina of superficiality it carries when eventually filed away in the Reznor oeuvre. I mean, Bowie himself wrote the damned piece in the original "Immortals" issue of RS, and for a while there in my thought proccess that alone seemed as interesting thing to write about as anything else related to The Downward Spiral.

And it was. And that's why I just said that. Yet Michael Trent Reznor remains a semi-famous, sort-of rock star... and a damned millionaire to boot! Does that dredge up any of the anger we were supposedly feeling and embracing in the 90s? Not really.

What were we talking about again?

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