Stuff I Like: Miles Davis

"I never thought that the music called 'jazz' was ever meant to reach just a small group of people, or become a museum thing locked under glass like all the other dead things that were once considered artistic." — Miles Davis

"White folks always think that you have to have a label on everything — you know what I mean?" - Miles Davis, interview with Les Tomkins, 1969



Over the course of a career that spanned nearly five decades, Miles Davis constantly stayed ahead of every label people tried to stick to him, including some he partially coined. Cool jazz, modal jazz, hard bop, fusion. Miles helped pioneer them all, mastered them and then moved on just as copycats moved in to try to figure him out. Everything about Miles screamed "genius" -- in the sideman world of jazz, he became a leader early and stayed a leader, spring-boarding from Charlie Parker's bebop quintet to make his breakthrough album, Birth of the Cool, a reversal from Parker's style despite Bird's input and the bebop chops of all involved. That was the first sign of Davis' ability to abruptly change everything, but it wouldn't be the last, not by a long shot.

Davis is often dismissed as the jazz musician rock kids listen to in order to say they listen to jazz. Musically, the connection between Davis and rock is thin (well, at least before he led the charge of moving jazz into rock, of course). I would look to John Coltrane and his sheets of sound before Miles' modal explorations when linking jazz to rock; Coltrane's spiritualism throughout the '60s even made the ties more obvious, what with the Love Generation rising around the same time. But aesthetically, oh man. There ain't never been a rock star like Miles Davis, and that was as true when he played smooth legato lines down in Birdland as it was when he took to stadiums. Davis once said he could tell if a cat could play just by how he stood; one look at Davis and you not only knew that he could play, you could surmise how he played. Cool in the classical (i.e. poised and resolute) and contemporary (i.e. one bad mutha) senses, Miles parlayed his glacial mood into the atmosphere of his music. Even when he pushed his music into fiery cataclysms of rock, funk and white-hot jazz, Miles still brought the smooth.

I will not try to write even a basic summary of Davis' progression from his days as a sideman after dropping out of Juilliard in '44 through his death in 1991 after he had crawled back from the brink and enjoyed a popular comeback almost no one expected of the habitual heroin addict. No single volume could ever capture the twists and turns of Davis' career nor the number of masterpieces he put out under ever-shifting lineups. Besides, I don't know a thing about music theory, so I would only stumble more in the futile effort to to catalog the evolutions and impacts of Davis' output.

What attracts me to Davis is that sense of growth, that incessant reaching for something more, something fresh. Born to a middle-class family in 1926, Davis fought against both racism from whites and scorn for his higher upbringing to keep African and African-American music alive. He abandoned the Western, white music preached at Juilliard to play jazz with Charlie Parker, helped bring the blues back to the medium via hard bop, and by the time he moved into jazz-rock and hard funk, he'd incorporated soul, funk, R&B and tribal rhythms into his sound. Everything Miles ever played tied into a rich musical past, but he modernized it, contextualized it around new ideas. In the process, he laid the foundations for future forms of black and urban music, from dance and dub (On the Corner) to electronic-driven hip-hop (much of his '80s material). Why, where would dear old Prince be without him?


Yet no matter how far Miles went with his sound, you can always recognize him. His chops, unreliable even during his rare moments of mental and physical health, do not lend to a consistency in sound: on some of his finest albums, Davis himself clearly falters, straining for notes and occasionally blowing out such watery tones I wondered if he just hadn't drained his spit valve in a month or so. You can hear the same soul-searching-as-tonal-straying at the nadir of his mid-'70s personal tailspin and a decade earlier with the second great quintet at the Plugged Nickel. And the powerful work with the first great quintet and resultant sextant returns later in Miles' earliest fusion recordings when the prince of darkness felt emboldened by his risky musical cartography. Through it all, however, he maintains a certain feel, a clearly defined approach that identifies the player as Miles from the first note.

The tone and the swagger might make Miles a dominating presence, but, for this writer, Davis' greatest contribution to music was his ability to find and nurture talent in others. Selecting only a handful of the musicians he launched through his work, one could still wind up with such names as John Coltrane, Chick Corea, Ron Carter, John McLaughlin and Tony Williams. He brought out the best in his bandmates, and while he unlocked their fullest potential, few reached the same level without him. The fusion musicians especially wandered without him, McLaughlin initially crafting incendiary work with the Mahavishnu Orchestra before that project set the benchmark for tedious, masturbatory excess in the genre. (Wayne Shorter and Chick Corea's projects followed similar arcs, while Herbie Hancock managed to break the mainstream by softening his style enough to work in pop.) Davis' ability to not just pick talent but give his backup musicians the space to explore made him more than a mere leader; small wonder that, by the time he released Bitches Brew, the album credited Miles with "directions in music." That's what he did, checked his inner compass and pointed his crew toward his idea of north, and along they went into the jungle. Somehow, they always made it to the other side.

After his five-year hiatus at the end of the '70s, Miles never fully recovered his embouchure nor his strength, but he still gathered significant rising talent, still pushed the boundaries where he could, still pushed himself. That restlessness is the truest sign of artistic genius. Davis himself railed against the idea of comfort and complacency in artists, treating it as the ultimate sign of surrender. Whether smoothly taking jazz forward by returning it to the pre-Bird and Diz days, incorporating the free jazz he initially disparaged into his work or finally playing over synthesizers and drum loops, Miles always worked fads and trends into his sounds, but when he played them he ensured their immortality. Since his death, Davis' legacy has only grown, partially because the half-admirable, half-cynical onslaught of box sets and archived material released but primarily because the public and critics are only now beginning to fully uncover the depth and beauty of his work. More than any artist, Davis encapsulated the technical and theoretical intricacies of jazz but also the emotional immediacy of the genre. Of course, by the end of his life, he'd moved so far beyond genre he could never be said to be representative of any genre, though he damn near mastered them all.


Top Ten Albums

1. Agharta/Pangaea (both 1975)

Two double-CDs culled from one day in Osaka (the former the afternoon show, the latter the evening gig), Agharta and Pangaea collectively represent the pinnacle of Davis musical wanderings. Agharta, taking its name from the mythological underground city filled with the greatest wisdom mankind could ever learn, appropriately matches its title. Churning like the magma in the Earth's mantle, it unleashes sounds unlike any that have been heard before or since, the fullest extent of Davis musical exploration. After the eruption of the first show, Pangaea cools the lava to form a new supercontinent, resetting the Earth to coincide with the uncovering of our destiny. The music here isn't as blazing as Agharta's, but cooling lava can still melt you.

Davis sounds on the brink of his impending collapse on these records, his pinched, electric squeal the dying moans of a sonic Moses trying to enter the promised land he's taken his people to, only to be denied at the last moment. Around him, his virile band -- Pete Cosey (one of a handful of guitarists to ever launch off Hendrix in just the right way, exploring sonic wash over technical tedium), Sonny Fortune, Reggie Lucas, good ol' Michael Henderson, Al Foster and Mtume -- gathers as if waiting to bear his casket. Beautiful, terrifying, conquering, defeated. It's all here. Not for the faint of heart. (Note: in 2006 Sony Japan remastered these albums, which can be found floating around the Internet as rips from the out-of-print DSD-CD. The remastering is revelatory, rescuing these sonic journeys from muddled whump-whump bass and overheated treble. It says something about the nature of the music that contemporary technology just couldn't handle it.)

2. Kind of Blue (1959)

The highest selling jazz album of all time and such an essential work it should be included gratis in all desert island selections alongside the Bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, Kind of Blue more than lives up to its sterling reputation. Universally hailed by critics and appreciators of all music styles, Kind of Blue represents the pinnacle of Miles' modal efforts, each song beginning on a key, not a theme, allowing for greater range of exploration during group improvisations and individual solos. Yet the focus on modal, not chordal or harmonic, development made each exploration melodic, to the point that the album rewards whether studied intently or played as background music. It's one of the few times Davis' backing group -- incidentally one of his finest, with Coltrane, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers and Jimmy Cobb contributing -- fully reflected Miles' own sound: cool, legato and beautiful. That unison makes the album listenable long after one nails down its variations.

3. A Tribute to Jack Johnson (1971)

Though Davis' mid-'70s material plunged the artist fully into soul-funk territory, A Tribute to Jack Johnson is by some degree the "rockiest" album he ever made. Opening on a downright sick riff by John McLaughlin, "Right Off" gives way to what is quite possibly Miles' strongest, boldest solo, the result of sobriety and a brief dedication to ultra-healthy living. The second side, "Yesternow," incorporates takes from a group take-off of "Shh/Peaceful," a modification of the bassline of James Brown's "Say It Loud — I'm Black and I'm Proud" and an edited version of the tune "Willie Nelson" recorded by a different lineup. Yet of all Miles' electric studio albums, this one sounds the least spliced together, the force of the music carrying a spontaneity and perfectly synchronized looseness to it that gives the illusion of being a single take. After Kind of Blue, Miles' purest record.

4. The Complete Live at the Plugged Nickel (recorded 1965, released 1995)

The second great quintet had only released one album together when then played seven gigs across two nights in December 1965, but you can tell from these complete recordings just why the lineup ended up Davis' longest lasting. With Miles himself slightly faltering, the rest of the band steps in, especially the boisterous Tony Williams on drums and a hopped-up Wayne Shorter looking to prove himself worthy of taking the spot vacated by John Coltrane. Packed into 8 CDs, these hours of music demonstrate exactly where Davis would take the quintet: forward through the past. They stick mainly to standards and classics from Miles' back catalogue, but each version played sounds different from the studio, and even the other versions heard at the club. After slamming free jazz for years, Miles starts to absorb some of it, freeing his compositions along harmonic and rhythmic lines. But he still directs his band through smooth jams, and his own solos sidestep the occasional weakness of his phrasing to overpower. Fair warning: your hard drive will not like you becoming a Miles Davis fan, but those lost gigabytes (oh yes, you'll measure Miles by the gig) are more than worth it.

5. Milestones (1958)

Following the brief dissolution of the first great quintet over money and drug issues, Miles let them back in and picked up Cannonball Adderley while he was at it in order to deliver his first great modal statement. Though it lives in the shadow of Kind of Blue, Milestones is nearly as worthy and features a white-hot band at its peak. As ever, Coltrane tends to start each song by lying down his sound, at which point Davis glides in and gently shapes those sheets in a direction as Paul Chambers saws his bass and Philly Joe Jones monitors the shifts in current to adjust the beat. More electric than Kind of Blue in tone, the album nevertheless has a stripped-down, classic tone that lets each song breathe. Essential.

6. In a Silent Way (1969)

Bitches Brew might have been the album to truly herald jazz fusion to an unsuspecting and unprepared world, but for my money Davis' first electric record holds more rewards. The sound of a band dipping its toe into the water to test its temperature, In a Silent Way is one of the quietest artistic revolutions I've ever heard. When Dylan went electric, he did so boisterously, scabrously, ready to take on anyone. But Dylan ultimately was only responsible to his own image. When Miles made the switch, some thought he took down jazz with him. Maybe they were right; Miles certainly did care for any kind of boundary after this. Heard today, I process only the gentle courage of the music, one figure drifting out into the darkness with a torch until he finds the way clear and calling the others to come to him until the next member of the party moves forward another hundred yards. Yet for the gentle nature of the album's probing, it still displays enough of Miles' restless invention that it still does not fit neatly into either jazz nor rock. Already, he was aiming beyond such labels.

(The degree of evolution and softly radical change in these two sidelong pieces is reflected by the strength of the Complete In A Silent Way Sessions box set, by some degree the strongest of all the mammoth sets documenting the creation of Miles' electric albums. Taking some piece from Filles de Kilimanjaro (the preceding second quintet album that was outright fusion in every way save electric instrumentation), alternate takes and revealing jams, the set demonstrates the astonishing pace with which Miles and co. advanced their already adventurous sound, even as it points toward the huge leaps to follow.)

7. Porgy & Bess (1958)

Davis scarcely looked back from his time at Juilliard, but he acknowledged the influence his brief formal education on his understanding of music theory. One of the clearest examples of that impact is Davis' take on Porgy & Bess, the Third Stream opera by George Gershwin, one that respects the original but emphasizes the ethnic flavors Gershwin sprinkled into his operatic gumbo. The best of Miles' collaborations with Gil Evans, Porgy & Bess is one of the most enduringly entertaining, complex and captivating of Davis' classic records. As ever, Miles does not settle for simply capturing the feel of the past, instead adding new dimensions, new interpretations, Davis' lyricism forging subtle new paths just as adroitly as the passages of Kind of Blue.

8. On the Corner (1972)

Always resentful of jazz's position in the public consciousness as something for the arty and elite, Miles constantly sought new ways to add current flavors to his music. On the Corner marked the first time Miles managed to fully jump ahead of the curve and predict a trend rather than work with one. With its title and finger-snappin' cover right out of a Fat Albert cartoon, On the Corner gave some idea as to its musical contents, but no one could have anticipated the sounds coming from the vinyl. Not only infused with soul and funk, On the Corner took Teo Macero's (a man deserving of Sir George Martin-esque veneration) editing skills to their zenith, piecing together fragments of hot, sulfuric sludge into one of Davis' most forward-thinking albums. Not only does it show Miles finally achieving his wish of becoming the Sly Stone and George Clinton of jazz, the album also lays down all new sounds. Hip-hop, dance music, even post-punk can be heard in its ragged, angular soundscapes and unexpected moments of swing. It's as scathing as Bitches Brew, and as revolutionary, but by now Miles and his crew (whomever they might be, for the lineups shifted all over these four numbers) had worked out the kinks, and one could tell they knew exactly what they were doing.

(Just as the In a Silent Way sessions proved fruitful, the box set of On the Corner provides hours of pleasure, incorporating all the outtakes that made fine cuts of their own on vault-airing releases Big Fun and Get Up With It and adding enough alternate takes to set the mouth watering. The box set for Bitches Brew contained a great deal of superfluous material, the one for A Tribute to Jack Johnson the most relevant to seeing how the final music was made (yet also the most boring save for a few fascinating takes), but the sets for In a Silent Way and On the Corner, though perhaps the ones that cheat most brazenly by widening the time interval to include material that simply fits with the final music and not just the relevant sessions, offer the greatest insights into Miles' electric growth.)

9. Birth of the Cool (recorded 1949/1950, released 1957)

Comprising three sessions in 1949 and 1950 with an orchestral nonet, Birth of the Cool's belated release in 1957 did nothing to detract from its forward-thinking prescience. Of course, by the time this compilation came out, Miles had moved far beyond, having already pumped out classics with his first quintet that found the harder edges around this sound, but other players scrambled to imitate it. Even today, it's easy to see why someone would be glad to copy it after Daivs himself had grown bored of the sound; hell, it'd be a joy to nail down this sound 20 years after the man passed on. Birth of the Cool has all the hallmarks of the classic Miles sound: smooth enough to go down without a fuss but with an after kick that makes your whole chest burn.

10. Sketches of Spain (1960)

After Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane departed Miles' band following Kind of Blue, Miles decided to morph the sound of that album to compensate, turning his ear to Spanish folk music after hearing a classical arrangement of the Concierto de Aranjuez. With Gil Evans, Davis crafted one of his finest modernist pieces, a work so respectful of the traditions it recreates that, if you close your eyes to sway with the piece, you start to think that you'll be in Barcelona when you open them. Backed by 19 musicians, Miles proved his leadership abilities once and for all. Plus, he would not sound as in command of his own playing for another decade; check the solo on "Saeta," his best until "Right Off" blasted out of speakers in 1971. One of Davis' most popular albums, it remains so for a reason.

Stuff I Like: Prince

Having been fortunate enough to miss the '80s and unfortunate enough to grow up solely on classic rock radio (home of the Eagles catalog and five played-to-death Zeppelin songs), Prince flew under my radar for many years. I believe the first real exposure I had to him came in the form of the Chappelle's Show sketch making fun of his weird personality. Shortly thereafter, I heard Kevin Smith's epic account of briefly working for the diminutive pop star in which every facet of an obvious Napoleon complex came to the fore. Content to let these less-than-flattering portraits make up the entirety of my awareness of His Royal Badness, I never thought twice about him until, on a whim a few years later, I listened to Purple Rain to see what the fuss was about.


By the time that deliriously glorious opening speech, half-cheesy and half-earnest, melted into the crunchy riff of "Let's Go Crazy," I was rewriting my simplistic, uninformed assessment of the man. By the time the album came to a close on its anthemic title track, I was a fan.

Moving deeper into Prince's discography, I found a series of albums that could drive the careers of several pop stars. Not only was he damn good, he was prolific. During his gold run through all of the '80s and the first part of the '90s, he put out double albums the way some release singles, and damn near everything he touched turned to gold. Sure, Diamonds & Pearls and Around the World in a Day weren't masterpieces, but he had four classics in the '80s alone and another two or three in the '90s.

For me, Prince is by some degree the most notable mainstream musician of the '80s. Every decade has one defining pop star, and the all tend to follow a pattern. The stars who send the fans wildest tend to be the ones to unlock the most inhibited sexuality. Elvis' gyrating hips gave way to the more socially rebellious Beatles, whose long hair perhaps informed David Bowie's androgyny, which in turn undeniably influenced Prince's full-on embrace of sexuality. Prince has a bit of all of them to his act, from Elvis' dancing to the Beatles' immaculate pop taste to Bowie's experimentation and constant reinvention. The next generation always builds off the previous ones, and Prince threw it all into one dripping stew.

He was sexually liberating, if you use "liberating" in the same sense that the US government did when we invaded Iraq: Prince tore down the infrastructure of sexual propriety and left people to pick up the pieces. His sleaziest material, released at the start of the '80s, epitomizes the post-Stonewall, pre-AIDs state of sex in America: Bowie played at being bisexual, but Prince never disguised being straight. It didn't matter. What he represented was boundless sexual euphoria, in which any form of human contact was sex. He left a clue for his unifying concept of love, lust and art on his second masterpiece, 1999 in the song "Dance, Music, Sex, Romance." It's all the same for Prince, and that energy makes his best work so enduringly fresh and wild.

It was only a matter of time before white Christian America caught wise to what he was doing, and when Tipper Gore heard her child listening to "Darling Nikki" she launched a crusade to protect America's parents from the horrible scenario of having to talk things out with their children. Imagine if she'd overheard "Sister" or "Jack U Off." Amusingly, in the endless debates the PMRC held with rock stars who generally acquitted themselves better than the would-be avatars of taste, those defending the PMRC routinely cited the Rolling Stones as an example of an edgy band from their childhood that wasn't as bad (and therefore it was OK for them to listen to then). Prince broke into the spotlight opening for the Stones on their Tattoo You tour in 1981, where he showed up in bikini bottoms and fishnets and was promptly booed off the stage. Before the PMRC cemented the dichotomy, Prince proved how tired and boring the Stones had become and how he'd come to embody all the roiling sexuality of their early, fierce work. Now it had its true outlet.

At his height, Prince's music aligned with his outrageous live presence: biracial and androgynous, Prince filled his bands with members of both genders and all races, and the music blended race music and white noise like no other. He embodied everything in himself, which is probably why he made so many of his albums practically alone, capable of playing any instrument and too egomanical to suffer anyone's opinion anyway. When he did bring players in, he drilled them as much as any jazzbo: the Revolution and the New Power Generation may not be as talented, but in terms of professionalism I would pit them against any of Zappa's lineups. The regulation and modulation of the band at Prince's every gesture can be heard even on scratchy bootleg audio, bands the size of a P-Funk house party at once loose and taut, capable of snapping to attention at a moment's notice before splintering off into conflicting yet united riffs and beats.

Trying to describe the effect of a great Prince song (especially a live one, as I've assembled a nice collection of bootlegs) can be tricky. After Elvis, Prince is the only male star who can effortlessly embody a Madonna/whore complex. Elvis stopped gyrating and glutting to sing some gospel, and Prince found the spiritual line underneath his sex long before he became a Jehovah's Witness. He finds a religious experience in that split-second after orgasm in which all control is lost and the brain just slacks before snapping back to attention. Every great Prince album builds to that climax then revels in the euphoria until worship and lust become the same thing: either way, you're on your knees.

Where the two previous entries of my Stuff I Like series have entertained me for the totality of their careers and can still be expected to produce quality work, I'm sad to say I can no longer depend on today's subject to rock out. During his heyday, Prince blew everyone out of the water, not just live but in the studio. Sadly, after fighting to break with Warner Bros. throughout the mid-'90s, during which time he pulled such eye-rolling bullshit as changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol and scrawled "Slave" on his face. Once free from the major labels, however, Prince demonstrated that his genius needed a third party to separate the wheat from the chaff. Since 1995's The Gold Experience, Prince has not released a truly great record, though Musicology and Planet Earth are solid and 3121 comes so close to classic status that part of its maddening, alluring tease is that it never quite reaches that level. Furthermore, for all the forward-thinking techno savvy of his records, Prince has proven to be something of a curmudgeon regarding the Internet, first attempting to break ground with a pioneering Web-based distribution service and perhaps growing bitter from the backlash he received over the disastrous results. Recently, he's hired representatives to troll the Internet ripping down all photos and videos of himself by claiming copyright, which stands as one of the most boneheaded artistic decisions ever made: it's as if he feels we collectively missed our chance to appreciate him so he won't let us figure it out now.

Nevertheless, the man still tears it up on stage, even if it may or may not be true he needs a double hip replacement and he no longer swears or slinks around like an animal in heat. Prince fought hard to be the next Hendrix, and he had the chops to pull it off. But it never quite materialized: people got tired of him before he got his dues or he let his image overshadow his considerable music skills. Either way, it's a damn shame one of the few great mainstream acts of the '80s got discarded when people pretended that decade never happened. Prince's recent efforts to concentrate on his guitar-playing abilities and live presence have reminded people of what a dynamic performer he is, though little in the way of studio gold has come from his efforts. Perhaps some day soon he can let loose again, not inhibiting his funk for the sake of Jehovah. But even if he doesn't, he'll still be one of the greatest showmen who ever lived, and the most underappreciated giant of late-20th century pop. It may be in the past now, but sometimes you just have to party like it's 1999.

Top Five Albums

1. Sign 'O' The Times

The spiritual successor to David Bowie's Station to Station, Sign 'O' The Times is apocalyptic robo-funk that only just manages to stay one desperate step ahead of the doom it portends throughout. Stripped of the Revolution, Prince returns to his one-man band ways, not just slinging the axe but laying down stiff but funky keyboard riffs as only he can. When he does invite the players back to help him out, he successfully condenses the manic energy of his stage show to the studio, from the rave-up "Housequake" to the actual live cut "It's Gonna Be a Beautiful Night." The album is certainly disjointed, and it's strange to think this double album is actually the focused condensation of the planned triple album Crystal Ball. Where else could a song about AIDs, the Challenger explosion and nuclear war rub up against a tune as joyous and bizarre as "Starfish and Coffee"? But it's all unified by a common idea: we could die any second, so dance and fuck until so you can go happy. W.H. Auden later rejected the idea behind one of his most loved poems, "September 1, 939" and wanted to change its most famous line, "We must love one another or die" to "We must love one another and die." The latter informs the mindset of Prince's greatest masterpiece. Question: anybody know about the quake?

2. Dirty Mind

After his eponymous second album yielded the disco leftover hit "I Wanna Be Your Lover," Prince had enough of a foothold to do a proper album but still needed to prove himself. The result was a scuzzy masterpiece, an icy-hot combination of over-processed but under-played digital noise and sultry analog funk. Sweat practically rolls out of your speakers when you play Dirty Mind. The stylistic evolution from the previous album is immense, introducing a number of hallmarks of Prince's sound (New Wave funk, poppy punk rock and burnin' hard rock) while still leaving space for all the exploration Prince would do over the next decade. The twin attack of "Head" and "Sister" are so tasteless they burn the buds off your tongue, but that just prepares you for what will come down the pipe in years to come.

3. Purple Rain

It's strange to think how much tinkering Prince did with the track listing, ordering and even individual track lengths for this album considering how the final product is so cohesive it sounds as if always planned to be one giant party song. (Having heard it, I do wish the full version of "Computer Blue" might have made the cut, though with an old vinyl another one of the record's perfect cuts would have had to be sacrificed.) From the fiery guitar work of "Let's Go Crazy" to the pleading "I Would Die 4 U" bleeding into the triumphant ode-to-self "Baby I'm a Star," Purple Rain covers so much ground but spotting the breaks not only between songs but during them is a near impossibility. If you're not a fan by the time the guitar solo in the closing track morphs into a sing-along, you have no soul.

4. 1999

Dirty Mind was Prince's first masterpiece, but 1999 is his first truly definitive album, collecting the steamy, hissing, cum-drenched funk of Dirty Mind and mixing it deftly with the confrontational but awkward politics of Controversy. Prince works best when he uses politics as nothing more than the reason to keep dancing, and this is the first of his attempts to dance his way through the End of Days. The first LP in the double album is perfection, the title track giving way to the mega-hit "Little Red Corvette" (to date, the best musical metaphor for a vagina) and the aptly named "Delirious," which digitizes rockabilly and proves Elvis rubbed off on Prince in the most unexpected ways. On side two are the terse manifesto "D.M.S.R." and the half-gorgeous, half-filthy "Let's Pretend We're Married," with a catchy chorus and verses that actually seem least dirty when the word "fuck" is used; at least it's more direct than the mental images Prince conjures elsewhere. The second record doesn't reach the same heights, but once again the tracks are all great. The anti-hispter "All the Critics Love U in New York" and claustrophobic "Something in the Water (Does Not Compute)" still bite, while the elegiac "Free" is as rousing as any of Prince's finest gentle anthems -- think "The Cross" and "Purple Rain." Proof Prince could do quantity and quality at the same time.

5. The Love Symbol Album

These days, seeing 18 tracks on a Prince album would fill me with dread, as I would anticipate the artist's lack of self-restraint and quality control. But the Love Symbol Album, announcing Prince's change of name and serving as the precursor to his open warfare with his label, carries the same quality/quantity mix as Prince's finest overstuffed '80s efforts. Prince dabbles in hip-hop for the first time (on a record he actually released, anyway) on the opening "My Name is Prince," which distills the self-aggrandizing nature of rap into a fine gin. "Sexy M.F." plays like a sultry, vulgar bit of lounge jazz. "The Morning Papers" is one of Prince's finest (and most neglected) love songs, and the Biblical "7" offers one of his most appealing visions of a heaven on Earth. The album's half-executed conception as a "soap opera" hinders the cohesiveness of the whole, but when the annoying segues drop out of the picture, the incredibly varied styles work together as well as the impossible contradictions of Sign 'O' The Times.

HM: The Black Album

Originally slated to be the follow-up to Sign 'O' The Times, The Black Album wound up in that massive vault of unreleased Prince goodies just before release when the artist had a vision of the record containing a great evil. For a record to scare Prince at the height of his powers speaks to the impact of the tunes, and The Black Album does not disappoint. Sandwiched between two of Prince's solo efforts, The Black Album is perhaps Prince's most straightforward band album, 8 slices of hardcore funk that can compete with Dirty Mind for sheer partyup bump-'n-grime. The experimentation with hip-hop precedes Love Symbol Album by four years. "Bob George" viciously attacks the glorification of violence creeping into mainstream black music to Prince's chagrin, while "Rockhard in a Funky Place" surfaces from the detritus of the Crystal Ball sessions and is one of the few tracks cut from Sign 'O' The Times to be as good as anything on the final product. Profane, sneering and sinister, The Black Album is also rollicking and primal in manners both joyful and fierce.

Best Bootleg: Den Haag, August 19, 1988

The obvious choice, yes, but this recording of Prince's aftershow in The Hague not only boasts superior audio quality but features the best demonstration of Prince's ability to make even a small nightclub into a space open enough to unleash his talent. The guitar solo of "Just My Imagination," the jazzy organ and early-'70s Miles brass of "Cold Sweat" and the final jam "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic" are explosive, tailored to the switch from stadium to club but also transcendent of time and space. "Rave Un2 the Joy Fantastic" may be the shortest 20-minute jam ever performed, free-flowing enough to alternate between instrumental showcases and driving grooves but always focused to prevent the more beleaguering aspects of excess. God I wish Prince would release some of these things as live albums. He and Springsteen just sit on gold mines.

Stuff I Like: Devin Townsend

Devin Townsend may be the closest thing extreme metal has to a singer-songwriter. As evocative of Van Morrison as Meshuggah, Townsend has amassed a trove of idiosyncratic, deeply personal music over a 20 years that contains enough albums and collaborations for a career lasting twice as long. The hardest metal has always come from the most unlikely of places: death and black metal emerged from from the chilled idyll of Scandinavia (well, and also Florida, but if you've ever driven behind people in Florida, death metal makes perfect sense). Townsend, born and bred in British Columbia, also came from calmer settings, and the rage that ripples through some of his work appears less his war with that environment than his deep desire to fit in with it.


One of Townsend's defining characteristics is his offbeat sense of humor, which helped get him his first major gig. For whatever reason, Townsend assumed that the best way to make his demo tape stand out from the stacks of CDs and cassettes was to wrap it in underwear. The trick worked, and guitar virtuoso Steve Vai plucked a 19-year-old Townsend from Canada to sing lead vocals on his attempt at a "band" album, the disjointed but interesting Sex & Religion. Vai's album might have displayed how out of his element the guitarist was when forced to write actual songs instead of solo showcases for himself and his prodigiously skilled backup musicians, but it also showcased an off-the-wall talent with an esoteric wit and an incredible range. Vai, who got his start as a player in one of Frank Zappa's lineups, inadvertently found one of the few musicians who would later be heralded as Zappa's heir.

But working as a gun-for-hire didn't particularly suit Townsend. Genius cannot work for someone else, and while there does not appear to have been anything remotely approaching animosity between Vai and Townsend, neither was in his element. After a brief stint as a touring backup for The Wildhearts, a band that found some glorious combination of Guns 'n' Roses, Metallica and The Beach Boys, Townsend properly struck off on his own, and he's been a powerhouse ever since.

Townsend's output can be generally divided into two groups: the music he makes under his own moniker (with an occasional "Band" or "Project" after "Devin Townsend"), and that which he makes as the head of Strapping Young Lad. The latter made his name, SYL's schizoid brand of industrial groove metal winning over metal critics with a combination of furious and humorous lyrics and Townsend's impeccable production, a crushing yet crystal clear sonic wash that makes Phil Spector's Wall of Sound resemble the sparse crackle of an old blues recording. Strapping Young Lad served as the primary outlet of Townsend's aggression, acerbic self-loathing at 185 BPM. For one of his albums, Alien, the bipolar musician stopped taking his medication and the recording reflects the fluctuations he suffered because of it, often within each song. For example, "Love?" -- the band's most successful single -- contained angry-man rejection and intense, crippling longing in the same verses, a sort-of five-minute version of Notes from Underground. Elsewhere, tracks displayed the unorthodox inspirations that swirl through Townsend's head, chiefly on "Skeksis," a track named for villains of The Dark Crystal and lyrically structured around a musical take on the conclusions drawn from Fermat's Last Theorem.

Strapping Young Lad existed in a field populated by like-sounding grind factories that buzz out riffs as fast as a guitar player can keep up with a drum machine, but Townsend and co. always stood out from the pack. It is something of a tired maxim that the best musicians are the ones who play least -- this is an oversimplifying extrapolation of the importance and grace of restraint -- but Townsend is one of the few who exemplifies this approach. In both SYL and his solo work, Townsend has given audiences glimpses into a prodigiously talented axeman, but he primarily works in moods and tones, even in the more straightforward sound of SYL. I've never wondered which Strapping Young Lad song I'm listening to when a riff kicks in: they're all distinct, all separate from each other, and most songs contain an impact beyond mere headbanging goodness.

For my money, however, it is Townsend's solo work that defines his fullest capacities as a musician. Townsend's first solo effort, Biomech, came first under the moniker of Ocean Machine, which later became an addendum to the album title, not a separate group. Released the same year as Strapping Young Lad's second (and best) album, the pummeling City, Ocean Machine was at the other end of the sonic spectrum. Where the SYL album packed Townsend's howling pain and nervosa into layered blasts of shrieks, perfectly executed double-bass drums (Gene Hoglan is a percussive John Henry in a sea of drum machines) and crashing riffs, Ocean Machine is far more insular. If City was a scream of rage, this was the ragged after-rasp, a pained croak through ruptured vocal cords that etched out an image of a man standing on the edge of a cliff trying to think of reasons not to jump. It is an album of almost painful beauty, frightening and isolated but plaintive and outreaching. Where the non-sequiturs in the Strapping Young Lad lyrics typically played as jokes, the esoteric memories foisted in chunks here (i.e. "Here I am/Driving through Japan" in "Night") constrict full meaning solely to Townsend's understanding even as he lets the audience into his thoughts.

That personal-to-the-point-of-obscure style pervades Townsend's canon, from a whispered "fuck off" in the middle of "Nobody's Here" on Terria that comes where one might otherwise have whispered an admission of love to the oddly endearing touch of off-poetry "You are the sun to my chameleon" on Synchestra's "Pixellate." Townsend crafts albums out of fractured moments, and those fragments are hard to shake loose. The bridge of Ziltoid the Omniscient's "Solar Winds", the soothing guitar solo of Terria's "Deep Peace," the totality of the minimalist triumph "The Death of Music" on Ocean Machine; these are the longer moments in the man's discography. I've not even counted the impassioned scream in the middle of "Night," the twanging break four minutes and 30 seconds into "Tiny Tears" or the yee-haw yelp of renewed vigor on "Supercrush!"

Townsend has always been prolific, usually good for an album a year and often for more than that, but newfound sobriety has turned an already dedicated artist into a force to be reckoned with. Since bottoming out after the release of the goofball concept piece Ziltoid, Townsend has returned with a four-part series as "The Devin Townsend Project," a title aptly summarizing the artist's attempt to take stock of himself. Two of the four albums have already been released, while the other two have been postponed only because Townsend continues to add songs to them, bumping at least one, and possibly both, to a double album. It's been a treat to hear how much fresher he sounds when he already sounded damn good, and where most artists slow down as they near 40, Townsend appears to be just entering his prime. I can't wait to hear how he keeps evolving.


Top Five Albums

1. Ocean Machine: Biomech (Devin Townsend, 1997)/Accelerated Evolution (Devin Townsend Band, 2003)/Addicted (Devin Townsend Project, 2009)

As I said in my review of Addicted, that album fits in with the other two as a "Bosch triptych in reverse," charting Townsend's ascent from hell to the mixed bag of Earth and, finally, to Heaven. It may be a complete cheat to put his three most accessible albums in one slot, but they feed off each other and demonstrate his abilities better than anything else he's done. From the spacious opener "Seventh Wave" to the triple-punch of "Funeral," "Bastard" and "The Death of Music" (quadruple-punch, if you count the hidden track "Things Beyond Things), Ocean Machine is intense, its pain in no way diluted for being chilled. Accelerated Evolution splits between pure pop metal and intense, pleading desperation ("Deadhead" is heartrending), capturing Townsend's bipolarity as well as Alien. And then there's Addicted, in which heavy metal is filtered through Enya and Europop. You gotta love it.

(Key track(s): Bastard; Deadhead; Numbered!

2. Terria (Devin Townsend, 2001)

The nearest thing to heavy metal's Walden, in which our maladjusted protagonist retreats into the sounds and textures of nature to try to sublimate. Like Thoreau, he is of course not really isolated but sounds like he is, and that's just as important. Also like Thoreau, he must eventually leave when he unintentionally conquers the world with which he wished to become one. It is hands down the most complex album Townsend's recorded, not in technical flash but emotional obtuseness and abstraction. But it's also his most rewarding, and the more times I head out to British Columbia with him for a retreat, the more fulfilled I am when I return.

(Key track: Nobody's Here)

3. City (Strapping Young Lad, 1997)

The best balance of Townsend's earlier humor and the force with which he'd propel later SYL albums, City is bursting at the seams with inventive, hilarious, terrifying extreme metal, its defiant anthem "All Hail the New Flesh" rubbing up against the rawer, less secure "Detox." Six years would pass before Townsend reconvened SYL, and the more carefree, anarchic humor that runs through tracks such as "Home Nucleonics" wouldn't again rear its head in so open a fashion.

(Key track: All Hail the New Flesh)

4. Alien (Strapping Young Lad, 2005)

If City was the most balanced SYL album, Alien works just as well for being the most unbalanced of them all. Apart from the aforementioned "Skeksis, " Townsend incorporates black metal into the opening "Imperial," quirky vocal harmonies in "Love?" (Eduardo Rivadavia of Allmusic aptly described the sound as "King's X from hell"), beautiful space in "Two Weeks" and the panic attack-literalizing static and hiss of "Info Dump." This album best exemplifies Townsend's ability to collide disharmonious sounds into a working, cohesive whole, and the tension between unity and discord is sometimes unbearable in the best way.

(Key track: Zen)

5. Infinity (Devin Townsend, 1998)

Terria may be Townsend's most complex album, but this is certainly his weirdest. Infinity is the most disconnected album he's ever put out -- including the final SYL album, a label-mandated affair that reeked of halfheartedness -- but luckily all the parts are worth listening to. It jumps from the euphoric opening teaser to a Wildhearts-esque love ditty (Ginger even co-wrote the lyrics) before dumping into "Bad Devil, the sound of Baron Samedi unleashed upon Nawlins through the power of rock. Where else can you hear a heavy metal trombone? The second half of the album contains the more personal touch of Townsend's best work, but it also has some of his strangest material ever, particularly the "wait, what the hell was that?" burst of gibberish that is "Antz." It's a mixed bag, but one of those mixed bags where all the different candies are still tasty.

(Key track: Life is All Dynamics)

Honorable Mention: Cooked on Phonics (Punky Brüster, 1996)

A one-off piss-take of the pop-punk resurgence of the mid-'90s, Cooked on Phonics profiles a death metal group that goes punk for the money and sells out everything for that bite of the cherry. Some of the jokes fall flat and one cannot listen over and over without breaks lest the gags that do work go stale, but this is probably the best indicator of Townsend's wit and his moral view of artistic integrity. Also, frankly, some of these tunes work as fantastic pop-punk songs. For completionists, only, perhaps, but still an album I return to with surprising frequency.

(Key track: Ez$, or the hidden tune "The Girls Next Door")