(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: As was the case with earlier Genre Delve installments on Hardcore vs. Post-Punk and Metal vs. Hard Rock, this article is gonna be a two-fer, because parsing “Funk” vs “Soul” is more difficult and arcane than I expected it to be when I first framed my genre categories. I tend to approach both idioms in an “I know it when I hear it” mindset, though the distinctions between Funk and Soul may be minor, at times, and there are many cases where one great album could readily fit in the Soul bucket, or the Funk bucket, or both buckets.

Both genres are anchored in the earlier Rhythm and Blues idioms that also birthed Rock n’ Roll, with strong influx from the sacred/Gospel side of the equation, especially in Soul music. Soul emerged as its own identifiable genre a bit before Funk did, with the term first documented to describe a musical sound/style around 1961. African-American music had, since the early 1940s, been tracked and charted in a segregated fashion; Billboard magazine had ranked such music under an evolving series of terms (first “The Harlem Hit Parade,” then “Race Records,” then various lists anchored around the catch-all “Rhythm and Blues Records” rubric) before beginning to track “Best Selling Soul Singles” in 1969. (That list has since been known as “Black Singles,” then “R&B Singles,” and “R&B/Hip-Hop Singles” from 1999 to present times). Of course, by the time Billboard began using the term “Soul,” the music had achieved significant crossover with the “non-Race” radio listening world, with numerous chart toppers through the latter parts of the 1960s. Motown, Stax, Atlantic, and Philadephia International Records all played key roles in recording and releasing many classic and commercially-successful Soul albums and singles, each label developing its own distinctive styles and sounds within the idiom.

Funk built on the established Soul framework, but shifted emphasis away from the melody and toward the groove, with bass and drum to the fore. Funk also featured more “self-contained” writing and instrumentation within groups, replacing the earlier “studio system” where house bands played songs written by house songwriters, with the singers publicly credited for the tracks (maybe) adding vocal stylings atop them, and then touring the product. Funk was often slower and punchier than Soul, and it tended to stretch songs out longer to make dance floors move. A key tenet of Funk is “The One,” the hard-stressed first beat of every measure. An equally key directive related to this tenet is: YOU DO NOT CLAP ON THE ONE!!! (As Buggy Jive once correctly noted in his song “This Is Not a Pipe:” The One is not for clapping, the One is where your ass goes.). While Soul Music certainly represented the messages of the Civil Right Movement ably and passionately, Funk Music tended to be more militant and activist in its messaging, recognizing that you could definitely think while you moved, and that the energy of a slamming groove is as great a motivator and inspiration as anything else readily served over the radio or in a club.

Another key difference between Funk and Soul lay in their stereotypical arrangements, where lush strings and other orchestrations were more likely to appear on Soul records, with punchy horn charts more prominent on Funk cuts. You were more likely to encounter studio and on-stage improvisation in Funk, while Soul tended to be more tightly composed and arranged. Funk drew a bit more than Soul on Jazz (especially Hard Bop) and Blues traditions, and it also tended to lend itself more to hybridization with other then-emergent forms, most especially Psychedelic Rock. Funk was freakier fare, Soul often smooth and sexy. (At the risk of being crass/coarse, I’ve heard the difference between the two described as “Soul is Lovemaking and Funk is F*cking,” and that’s not a bad summary, on some plane, when outside of polite company).

Great Funk and Soul cuts have been sampled and recycled since the dawn of Hip-Hop, keeping some of those classic grooves in the minds, ears, and hearts of generations of listeners not yet born when their beats were first laid down. Elements of Soul and Funk also fed back into Jazz, especially on the Fusion side of things, in the 1970s, and their killer dance-floor beats were directly contributory to the rise of Disco, which also brought in elements of Urban LGBTQ+ culture, and the driving monomania of America’s peak cocaine years. Billboard and similar music trade magazines never gave Funk its own charts, instead broadening their Soul banner to include everything from the smoothest harmony groups through the gnarliest dance bands, unfortunately focusing solely on the reductive “Black” aspects of the artists and their music over any actual distinctions between the idioms.

This, of course, is part of why it’s complicated to this day to parse the diversities between the genres, especially during their ’60s and ’70s heyday. But, being a list-making kinda guy, I’m going to give you two “Favorite Albums Ever” lists below, one for the Funk, one for the Soul. I’m going with some gut feel here in what I include in each list, and I am certain that we could have long and passionate arguments about where I draw the line, so if that’s problematic for you, then just merge the lists together and read them as “My Twenty Favorite Funk/Soul Albums Ever.”

MY TEN FAVORITE FUNK ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Sly and the Family Stone, Stand! (1969): San Francisco’s Sly and the Family Stone were the first multi-ethnic and multi-gendered group to score big on the pop music charts. Their first six albums are all essential, but Stand! (their fourth album) marks their pinnacle to these ears, the point where the original line-up was firing on all cylinders, and before Sly Stone’s mental health issues became problematic.

2. Funkadelic, Maggot Brain (1971): Maggot Brain was the third and final album by the incredible original lineup of Funkadelic, and it’s a masterpiece. That said, I debated about whether to include this LP or another from George Clinton’s early instrumental crew, as Maggot Brain is as psychedelic as it is danceably “funky” in the most common use of that word. But, hey, Funk often got weird, and this is the apex of that alignment.

3. Miles Davis, On the Corner (1972): While I’ve never really been a big fan of “Fusion” (Instrumental Rock + Jazz), I do quite love whatever we should call the more interesting merger of Funk + Jazz. On the Corner was critically hammered by the snooty jazz media upon its release, but in some ways, it may stand as Miles Davis’ most influential, forward-looking album, a masterpiece of groove, improv, and found sound.

4. Curtis Mayfield, Super Fly (1972): Isaac Hayes’ score for the 1971 film Shaft made Ike the first Black artist to win an Oscar for Best Original Song. But Curtis Mayfield’s score for 1972’s Super Fly was a stronger album, soup to nuts, than Shaft. The score actually out-sold the film, and its title song and “Freddy’s Dead” were both huge hits. Super Fly was also arguably a concept album, picking up a popular rock trend of the era.

5. Herbie Hancock, Head Hunters (1973): Herbie Hancock played on Miles Davis’ On the Corner (cited above), and a year after his work on that landmark, Hancock put together a killer band of his own to release the funk-jazz masterpiece Head Hunters. While this disc is often labeled as “Fusion,” I find it tighter and punchier than most of that hybrid genre, far more compelling than the noodlier stuff many fusionists played.

6. Earth, Wind & Fire, Open Our Eyes (1974): EWF main-man Maurice White grew up in Memphis and cut his musical teeth as a blues session player at Chicago’s famed Chess Records, then as jazz pianist Ramsey Lewis’ drummer. It took a few albums for his own band to find their unique style, but they most certainly had achieved that mark by the time of Open Our Eyes, the most consistently funky LP in their deep, great catalog.

7. Parliament, Mothership Connection (1975): While I only allow one album per artist on these lists, and while Parliament and Funkadelic (“P-Funk”) could be considered as a single act operating under different names for contractual reasons, there were true conceptual variances between the two, and the players on this disc and Maggot Brain were almost entirely different. So it stays, as the funkiest disc in the P-Funk Universe.

8. War, Why Can’t We Be Friends? (1975): War got their start as a backing band for Eric Burdon of The Animals, but he left in 1970 after their second album together, and they went on to greatness without him. This disc is the septet’s seventh without a personnel change, and it is a tight monster of monumental grooves and great singalong melodies. The title track and “Low Rider” are among the ’70s most tenaciously tasty jams, surely.

9. Mother’s Finest, Another Mother Further (1977): This one’s the most obscure entry here, but I love it, and it funks ferociously with hard rock guitar, so it earns a spot, since these are (after all) my own favorites. Mother’s Finest are an Atlanta-based juggernaut, formed in 1970 by singers Joyce Kennedy and Glenn Murdock, guitarist Gary Moore (not that one), and bassist Jerry Seay, all of whom remain in the group to this day.

10. Prince, 1999 (1982): Prince remained an active, prolific, working musician right up until his untimely death in 2016, but his true legend is built on the extraordinary run of nine albums he released between 1978 and 1987, every one surprising, amazing, and exciting upon real-time release. 1999 is arguably his magnum opus (though 1984’s Purple Rain outsold it, by a lot), with two solid discs of sexy, spiritual, topical Funk.

MY TEN FAVORITE SOUL ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Aretha Franklin, I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You (1967): The Queen of Soul issued nine fairly wan albums of jazz standards on Columbia Records before jumping to Atlantic Records in 1967. Her label debut was an absolute masterpiece, with Aretha’s formidable vocal chops supplemented by her under-appreciated piano work and great session playing by members of the Muscle Shoals Rhythm Section. “Respect,” indeed!

2. Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul (1969): Isaac Hayes’ sophomore disc was a weird wonder, with a 19-minute version of Jimmy Webb’s “By The Time I Get to Phoenix” and a 12-minute version of Burt Bacharach’s “Walk On By” book-ending a pair of shorter tunes, one written by Ike. Sounds like it could be a bore, but it’s anything but, with Hayes’ smooth baritone raps and some rich arrangements making the music soar.

3. Marvin Gaye, What’s Going On (1971): Marvin’s eleventh studio disc is a concept album exploring inequity and injustice through the eyes of a Vietnam veteran returning home in challenging times. Its themes are dark, but its tunes are transcendent, with Gaye’s beautiful melodies atop lusciously arranged instrumental beds. It was a hit in its time, and remains a perpetual entry on any “Best Albums Ever” list worth its salt.

4. Al Green, Let’s Stay Together (1972): Al Green was a phenomenally successful Soul artist in the early 1970s, with this and most of his other great albums featuring original songs able served by killer performances from the Hi Rhythm Section. But after some tragic domestic struggles near the peak of his success, he shifted from Soul to Gospel, later becoming an ordained pastor. Let’s Stay Together is his greatest secular LP, easily.

5. Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, I Miss You (1972): The Blue Notes were formed all the way back in 1954, but never achieved lineup stability nor major success until they hired drummer Teddy Pendergrass in 1970, then promoted him to lead singer. By 1972, they’d signed to Kenneth Gamble and Leon Huff’s hugely influential Philadelphia International label and released I Miss You, arguably their finest, most-consistent work.

6. Billy Paul, 360 Degrees of Billy Paul (1972): Another exemplar of the Philadelphia International sound, Billy Paul was a Philly native who made his first recordings in 1952. After a stint in the Army (he served with Elvis Presley), Paul led a Hard Bop jazz ensemble, then was also briefly a Blue Note. This fantastic record explores many of Paul’s musical touch-points, highlighted by the Soul masterpiece “Me And Mrs Jones.”

7. The Spinners, Spinners (1973): Yet another group formed in the early 1950s who performed in a yeoman-like fashion for many years before maturing into their mature, masterpiece form. Spinners was their third album, and the first with masterful singer Philippé Wynne joining long-time members Billy Henderson, Bobby Smith, Henry Fambrough, and Pervis Jackson. Beautiful music, sung sublimely, ear-worms aplenty.

8. Barry White, Can’t Get Enough (1974): Barry White is the absolute peak performer of smooth and sultry ’70s romantic Soul, his basso profundo voice and larger-than-life personality making him a most influential and popular performer at his peak. Working as both a solo artist and as a member of The Love Unlimited Orchestra, Can’t Get Enough marked White’s commercial apex. Nicely enough, it was also his best album.

9. Stevie Wonder, Songs In the Key of Life (1976): Stevie’s another of those artists who’s definitely funky, and supremely soulful, and hugely successful, and incredibly innovative and influential. While Songs In the Key of Life isn’t quite my fave Wonder disc (that would be Talking Book), it best embodies the sounds, styles, and messages of Soul Music, and it was his most commercially successful disc, with five hit singles. That’ll do.

10. Silk Sonic, An Evening With Silk Sonic (2021): It’s rare, in my experience, for artists to undertake a tongue-in-cheek tribute to a beloved musical genre, and then to make a record that ends up as good as those they’re honoring. Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats is one such album, and this Bruno Mars/Anderson .Paak tribute to ’70s Soul is another. Super songs, arrangements, and sentiments, which always make me smile.

As I do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other favorites to give them setting and context. While I’ve ranked Funk and Soul separately above, I acknowledge that the lines are fuzzy enough that a single playlist will suffice. Of course, there’s so much to choose from, so it’s a big playlist (150 songs), suitable to soundtrack an entire day if you want it to, as I often do. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for other things that I might find interesting.

(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: When I first framed the idea for this series exploring my favorite albums in various musical genres, I included “Punk” in the list of a dozen or so musical idioms to be considered. That seemed a reasonable inclusion, since the Punk Revolution, circa 1977, was one of the most transformational disruptions in the history of contemporary popular music, arguably only exceeded in its reach and impact by the emergence of Hip-Hop/Rap. (I know that some critics and listeners would cite the 1991 Grunge Revolution as a similarly impactful turning point in modern music, but I strongly disagree with that perception, and always have). But as the Punk entry in this series comes up in the sequence, I find myself reconsidering, because the actual pinnacle period of Punk was very short, it emerged from a series of earlier trends, and it quickly turned into other things, some creatively impressive, some just the staid music industry co-opting and rebranding the movement for its own profit-making purposes.

In the United States, especially in New York City, Cleveland, and Detroit, a variety of artists emerged in the early 1970s, many of them claiming the Velvet Underground as inspiration, mining various combinations of experimental, raw/raucous, electronic, political and/or “garage” styles, often adding unusual sartorial choices to the visual mix of their live performances. Those elements began to cohere into a scene around the legendary club CBGB in New York’s Lower East Side, and said scene was documented by a variety of independent ‘zine-type publications, most notably Punk, which put out 15 issues between 1976 and 1979. (I was living near New York City at the time, and was deeply interested in what was happening there). The movement reached critical mass around 1976-77, but when you look at the most legendary and influential groups of the CBGB scene at the time, you see acts like The Ramones, Blondie, The Patti Smith Group, Television, and Talking Heads, who really have virtually no musical commonalities between them, beyond the fact that they played the same venue(s), and were written about by the same journalist(s).

Of that seminal quintet of New York/CBGB bands, the only group that arguably played Punk music (e.g. high speed rock with simple chord structures and silly or gritty lyrics) were The Ramones, who did it better and longer than anybody, and codified the American scene’s leather and denim look. All of those groups issued their first albums on what were then “major” record labels, and all but the Ramones almost immediately began making music that sounded nothing like Joey, Johnny, Dee Dee and Tommy. (And Richie and Marky and C.J., later). Because Punk was getting media attention and selling records, the Rock Industrial Complex queued up to sign bands, but given the negative impacts of the word “Punk” on music markets outside of New York, Cleveland, and Detroit, they quickly applied a nicer, more marketable label to their creative acquisitions: New Wave. Various second and third wave “punk” bands (e.g. The Green Days of the world) have continued to make Ramones-style music in the ensuing decades, but they’re generally doing so with corporate backing, dressing as though they were Lower East Side dregs, and raking in the dough for damning the man that pays them. Ho hum.

On the other side of the pond, Punk was arguably a bigger, national deal, rather than a primarily regional eruption that most Americans only experienced in music magazines or via outraged television coverage. I’ve had a variety of fascinating conversations on the Fall Online Forum over the past ~20 years with English peers who watched Punk unfold in real time over there, building on (among other things) the earlier Pub Rock scene, cross-pollination with the CBGB-centric American movement, and massive social and economic tumult that wracked the country in those years, creating the “No Future” sentiment so prevalent among the early UK Punks and their devotees. The Damned are generally credited with issuing the first punk single (“New Rose”), The Sex Pistols were media demons (goaded by their provocation-hungry handler, Malcolm McLaren), The Clash injected reggae rhythms into the mix, and Crass added forceful political content to the simmering brew. On the audience side, the Bromley Contingent and other fan groups (initially inspired by some of Vivienne Westwood’s sartorial creations at her shop, SEX, where many early Punks worked or hung out) locked down the distinctive Punk uniform into the public’s consciousness, with piercings, and Mohawks or other odd haircuts, and a variety of salacious clothing choices completing the sartorial affront. In aggregate, it seemed that Punk meant more to more people in the UK than it did in the USA.

Tours by those iconic early Punk bands were hugely influential outside of the movement’s London base, and scads of bands quickly emerged, though the ones we remember today weren’t generally the ones who sounded like, say, The Sex Pistols (medium-high-speed, well-produced rock and rock music with sneering/political lyrics), but instead were the ones who simply took Punk’s”DIY” ethos (“Do It Yourself”) and deployed it to make their own new and interesting sounds. The best examples of that regional distillation and dissemination were the Sex Pistols’ first two shows in Manchester, at the Lesser Free Trade Hall, in June and July of 1976. Audience members at those shows later went on to form the following bands: Joy Division (and New Order), The Fall, The Smiths, Magazine, The Buzzcocks, and Simply Red. Yeah, maybe there was some stereotypical Punk-sounding fare in their earliest days, but most of them were sounding nothing like Punk by the time they released their first or second albums, even if they may have still publicly espoused Punk as a tag for their movement. As American bands were hoovered up and rebranded as New Wave, their English counterparts got swept up into New Romantic and other similar label-driven genres, which helped with their sales, but not with their musical authenticity and creative impact.

At bottom line, for me, Punk was a crucial movement that changed the ways the music industry and audiences interacted with performers, and marked the death knell of the more elaborate and pompous prog that preceded it, but there weren’t really a lot of great Punk albums released during its brief but inflammatory glory days. Yeah, if pushed, I’d name records by The Sex Pistols, and Damned, and Clash, and Ramones, and maybe some Richard Hell, but none of them are, honestly, anywhere near the top tier of albums in my personal pantheon. Beyond the Punk eruption, I am far more interested in the critically-valid musical idioms that arose around the DIY and related independent record label movements of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and from which scads of great albums emerged. For the purposes of this series, then, I am going to take a similar approach as I did in my Metal vs Hard Rock installment, and consider the two closely-related genres that quickly emerged in Punk’s wake: Hardcore (primarily a North American phenomenon) and Post-Punk (which was more UK-centric).

Hardcore merged Punk attitudes and culture with a more aggressive and faster-paced music, and its key scenes in the late ’70/early ’80s were Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Washington, DC. I was fortunate to have the chance to see some seminal hardcore acts in DC in the early ’80s, and then was also fortunate to have been working as a music critic in Albany, New York in the ’90s, when that region had an extraordinary local hardcore scene, and was also a key stop on the national hardcore circuit. One of my very favorite pieces of writing in my professional/academic career was an article titled Rulebound Rebellion: An Ethnography of American Hardcore Music (2009), within which I explored the ways that hardcore culture had evolved over its first 20 years, and what it meant to those who played it, attended shows, and made the shows possible. I still love the piece, and commend it to your attention, if it’s not obnoxious of me to do so.

Post-Punk was a catch-all term focusing on the bands who rode in the slipstream of Punk, while making music that had nothing in common with Punk’s primal sounds, perhaps beyond the fact that the musicians making the music were usually untrained and even unskilled, but were visionary enough to deploy their less-than-superstar skills in fascinating and original fashions. This movement was more prominent in the UK, though there were certainly hugely influential American bands who deserve inclusion in any coverage of this idiom. I would argue that Hardcore and Post-Punk had their most glorious years in the early ’80s, after which the major labels, again, began hoovering up artists from independent labels, lumping them as “Alternative Rock,” which was essentially a branding just like “New Wave,” designed to move records under an essentially meaningless rubric. One of my all-time favorite pieces of music-related writing is Michael Azerrad’s Our Band Could Be Your Life: Scenes from the American Indie Underground, 1981–1991, which documented the rise and (creative) fall of both the American Hardcore and Post-Punk movements, from their emergence until their corporate co-opting.

Because I am considering two related, but not identical, genres, I provide two lists below, of my ten favorite Hardcore albums ever, and my ten favorite Post-Punk albums ever. Punk ethos, Punk energy, Punk power, but far more musically interesting than the actual long-form recorded documents of the Punk peak.

MY TEN FAVORITE HARDCORE ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. D.O.A., Something Better Change (June 1980): D.O.A. were (and are) a highly-political Vancouver-based Canadian band fronted by sole permanent member Joey “Shithead” Keithley. Something Better Change was their debut album, and it is filled with classic tunes, well-written and played. D.O.A’s next album, Hardcore ’81, is considered to mark the first documented use of the word “hardcore” to describe their musical form.

2. The Replacements, Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash (August 1981): My wife grew up with various members of Minneapolis’ Replacements, whose debut album offered a wild and raucous range of Upper Midwestern Hardcore. They mellowed musically in the years that followed, though not personally, and their self-destructive tendencies remain a key part of the narrative of their rise, fall, and subsequent legend.

3. Black Flag, Damaged (November 1981): Black Flag guitarist Greg Ginn’s SST Records was one of the most influential record labels of the 1980s; I bought all of the label’s releases until around 1986, because I trusted their roster and taste. The Flag issued several singles with a three early singers (Keith Morris the best known) before debut LP Damaged marked the arrival of their greatest front-man, Henry Rollins.

4. Fear, The Record (May 1982): Black Flag and Fear both appeared in Penelope Spheeris’ essential California Hardcore documentary The Decline of Western Civilization (1981), and Fear became infamous for their chaotic, John Belushi-brokered appearance on Saturday Night Live. The debut album is a killer: snarling, gnarly, and featuring some exceptionally accomplished instrumental work from the band.

5. Dead Kennedys, Plastic Surgery Disasters (November 1982): Dead Kennedys’ singer Jello Biafra also ran a record label, Alternative Tentacles, that competed with SST for primacy in the early ’80s; I also bought all of their albums in those years. Plastic Surgery Disasters was the DKs sophomore LP, and there’s no slump to be found in its grooves. Like Fear, its musicians were technically formidable, not just wham-bam amateurs.

6. Suicidal Tendencies, Suicidal Tendencies (July 1983): Venice, California’s Suicidal Tendencies’ debut LP includes one of the most choice singles of the era, “Institutionalized,” which perfectly captured the angst, agita, and anomie of its time and place. The rest of the record is super, too, and it stands as one of the best-selling Hardcore albums ever. The group soldier on to this day behind singer Mike Muir.

7. Hüsker Dü, Zen Arcade (July 1984): Another SST release, Zen Arcade was one of the most mind-warping records of my life; I discuss that in detail in my eulogy for drummer-singer Grant Hart, here. The Hüskers were among the first independent bands to make the leap to the majors, and that quickly destroyed them, though singer-guitarist Bob Mould maintains an exceptional solo career to this day.

8. Minutemen, Double Nickels on the Dime (July 1984): Yet another SST album by San Pedro, California’s most beloved sons. With 55 songs spread over four sides, one curated by each of the trio’s members, and one “chaff” side, Double Nickels offers a potpourri of spiky, angular riffs, rants, and rhythms. The death of singer-guitarist D. Boon in a 1985 auto accident may well be American hardcore’s greatest tragedy.

9. Crisis, Deathshead Extermination (March 1996): As noted above, I was heavily involved as a critic in the Albany’s Hardcore scene in the late ’90s. We got loads of NYC Hardcore bands passing through town, and Crisis were among my very favorite. Karyn Crisis was an extraordinary front-person, both in terms of her potent vocals and stage presence, and Deathshead is the best studio capture of her and her band-mates’ fire.

10. Candiria, Beyond Reasonable Doubt (October 1997): Another NYC Hardcore band who were regular visitors to Albany in the late ’90s, Candiria offered a fascinatingly jazz-based take on the genre. In this album’s era, the quartet were a bass-less, twin-guitar juggernaut, who deployed technically impressive improvisational techniques in the studio. Lots of knots, kinks, twists, and punches in the music, which is wildly special.

MY TEN FAVORITE POST-PUNK ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Wire, Pink Flag (November 1977): Wire’s debut LP demonstrates how quickly great groups inspired by Punk were able to deploy its ethos to make truly original music that sounded nothing like Punk. Pink Flag is filled with exquisite, odd little musical vignettes, where the group did and said what they wanted to in each song, then moved on, each miniature perfect in its form and function. Bonus: A Pink Flag adventure story.

2. Pere Ubu, The Modern Dance (February 1978): Cleveland’s Pere Ubu arose from the ashes of Rocket From the Tombs (as did The Dead Boys), and were ahead of the curve in independently releasing their own early singles. Their debut LP found their “classic line-up” in place, and it is a marvel of literate lyrics, squawking vocals, and widdly synths, atop sturdy, swinging rhythmic beds. Weird then, still weird, always wonderful.

3. Devo, Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (August 1978): Another Cleveland band, Devo formed after the Kent State killings, committed to exploring “de-evolution.” They spent most of the ’70s honing their philosophy and sound, generating enough buzz that both David Bowie and Brian Eno angled to produce this debut LP. (Eno won). Their 1978 appearance on Saturday Night Live was utterly shocking, magical, and wonderful.

4. Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures (June 1979): Inspired by Sex Pistols’ Manchester shows, and the bleak spaciousness of David Bowie’s Low, Joy Division’s debut is a dark masterpiece captured (by eccentric producer Martin Hannett) in one of the most icy, austere sound fields ever committed to vinyl. Singer Ian Curtis tragically took his own life just before a planned US tour; his band-mates continued on as New Order.

5. Talking Heads, Fear of Music (August 1979): Talking Heads were one of the original CBGB bands, and by their third album, they’d become a funky, weird rhythm machine. Brian Eno also produced this one, and Robert Fripp makes a guest appearance. Talking Heads haven’t really aged well for me, overall (I never need to hear “Psycho Killer” again, ever), but Fear of Music is the one disc in their catalog that I still play to pieces.

6. Gang of Four, Entertainment! (September 1979): Formed at England’s Leeds University in 1976, Gang of Four offered exceptionally literate and political lyrics atop a truly powerful rhythm section, and fired by the late Andy Gill’s electrifyingly sharp and spiky guitar work. Their debut LP is a stone-cold masterpiece, every cut essential, offering one of the most perfect blends of funk and experimentalism ever captured.

7. This Heat, Deceit (September 1981): A trio of two seasoned and one rookie musician, the short-lived This Heat offered stark experimental music, anchored around drummer Charles Hayward’s irregular rhythms, and featuring lyrics that explored the dark head spaces of a world on the cusp of a potential global/nuclear/economic disaster. Hugely influential, yet somehow offering sounds no one else ever captured.

8. The Fall, Hex Enduction Hour (March 1982): Easily the most prolific group on my list, the late Mark E. Smith’s evolving squad pushed out consistently great, challenging music for ~40 years. Many Fall fans (casual and obsessive alike) cite Hex Enduction Hour as their finest LP, me among them. Fall drummer Paul Hanley’s book Have A Bleedin’ Guess covers the LP’s creation, and it’s one of the best music memoirs I’ve ever read.

9. Bauhaus, The Sky’s Gone Out (October 1982): I bought this album when I was at the Naval Academy, and as I was playing it for the first time (loudly) a neighbor came by and asked that I put on headphones, because he found it so disturbing. That’s impressive! While Bauhaus’ debut single, “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,” is arguably their most memorable and influential cut, I consider this album to be their best long-form release.

10. Butthole Surfers, Psychic . . . Powerless . . . Another Man’s Sac (December 1984): Austin, Texas’ grottiest sons and daughters were my favorite band for many years, probably longer than I’d cite any other passing favorite. This was their debut LP, though I’d already had my mind warped by their pair of earlier EPs, one studio, one live. A swirling cesspool of gnarl and drool, with Paul Leary’s refried guitar making it soar.

As I do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other favorites to give them setting and context. (Unfortunately Fear’s The Record is not available on Spotify, but all of the others are). As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for other things that I might find interesting.

(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: I can’t think of any nation that hits above its musical weight class more than Jamaica does, in terms of the long-term global practice, recognition, and influence of its native musical genre(s), all born from an island with a population of less than two million people during the nascent years of its most popular musical export.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the Jamaican Mento style competed with the Calypso of Trinidad and Tobago as the predominant Caribbean mergers of West African musical traditions with (mostly) Euro-American rhythms and instrumentation. Both of those  musical idioms found their way into American and English popular music, via various jazz, R&B, folk, and skiffle artists’ repertoires. By the early 1960s, Ska emerged, blending Mento elements with more overt jazz and R&B components, through the deployment of Jamaica’s famed “sound systems,” where Jamaican DJs imported American records, then adapted them (often live, and often without crediting their original sources) to communicate their own rubrics and messages. Ska’s lyrics tended to focus on bawdy narratives and the real-life experiences of the Jamaican people, making it popular with dance-favoring youth.

Ska in turn gave way to Rocksteady in the mid-1960s, with prominent vocal harmonies, arranged horn charts, slower tempos, and the distinctive “chukka chukka” staccato guitar/piano styles laid atop off-beat drum and bass figures, with those  bass parts becoming ever more prominent in the mix. Rocksteady leaned a bit more into romantic themes in its lyrics than Ska did, making it closer sonically and conceptually to American Soul music than it was to American R&B and Funk.

In 1968, the legendary Toots and the Maytals cut a single called “Do the Reggay,” giving the next generation of Jamaican music the name it bears to this day, under a different spelling. Reggae’s wordsmiths drew in both a greater sense of general social commentary, while also specifically embracing the culture and teaching of the Rastafarian religion, making it a much more spiritual music than its forebears. Reggae tended to be rawer than Rocksteady, and shuffling organ parts became more prominent in the sonic mix. As the ’70s advanced, many of the early sound system pioneers became record producers, and dub concepts (where bass and drum parts were amplified and echoed, with wild sonic interjections and incursions atop those laconic instrumental beds giving the music a spacey and trance-heavy flavor) emerged as a cornerstone to the Reggae sound and experience.

Many artists and producers continually adapted their craft across the Ska > Rocksteady > Reggae transitional decade, most notably (in 20/20 hindsight anyway, if not at the time) The Wailers, with Bob Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny (Livingston) Wailer as the group’s vocal mainstays. Island Records played a key role in carrying Ska, Rocksteady, and Reggae to the global market, celebrating the homeland of the label’s founding visionary, Chris Blackwell. The 1972 Jamaican film The Harder They Come, with its awesome soundtrack/score, was an international box office smash, and is widely considered to be the one vehicle that most clearly brought Reggae to the world’s attention; Blackwell served as an uncredited investor/producer of the film.

By the early 1970s, various American popular artists had either scored hits with their own Reggae-flavored tunes (e.g. Paul Simon’s “Mother and Child Reunion”) or covers of songs by Reggae artists (e.g. Eric Clapton’s [lame] version of Bob Marley’s “I Shot the Sheriff”). English Punk and Post-Punk artists also embraced Reggae, with The Clash (among others) prominently featuring Jamaican covers or stylistically skanking songs in their catalog, and Public Image Ltd. (also among others) deploying Dub techniques in fascinating ways in their early releases.

And, of course, as discussed in the Hip-Hop/Rap installment of this series, it was Jamaican immigrant DJ Kool Herc who is largely credited with creating Hip-Hop in the Bronx in 1973, deploying Jamaican sound system and toasting techniques. Reggae continues to be a vibrant musical idiom in its native land and around the world, and the subsequent emergence of Second Wave Ska in Britain in the early ’80s (largely through the catalogs of the incredibly influential 2 Tone Records), and Third Wave Ska (largely an American phenomenon, with Reggae elements blended with hardcore/post-punk instrumentation/energy, and a re-embrace of horn parts) demonstrate its lasting influence and adaptability.

The first Reggae songs I would have encountered were those American radio hits by white artists adapting/covering the idiom. (I liked Robert Palmer’s “Pressure Drop” a lot more than I liked anything by Simon or Clapton on that front). I am pretty sure that the first “real” Reggae album I acquired on my own volition was Babylon By Bus, a 1978 double live album by Bob Marley and The Wailers, half a decade after Bunny Wailer and Peter Tosh had left the group to pursue their own solo careers. I got much more heavily into the genre in the early ’80s, as a big fan of 2 Tone artists such as The Specials, The Beat, The Bodysnatchers, and The Selecter. As I often do, when I discover new and interesting music, I then go back in time to figure out where it came from; I would say Peter Tosh was probably my earliest Reggae favorite, and the artist who pulled me into the idiom most effectively and emphatically.

While I have a large, wide, and deep appreciation for and knowledge of Reggae artists (both famed and obscure), creating my Ten Favorite Albums list below was more challenging than I would have expected it to be, as so many of the best examples of the music were released as singles, or appear in various incarnations/dub versions, or feature on multiple compilations. Many of the greatest Reggae producers weren’t necessarily album focused during the genre’s creative peak in the 1970s, so there are many artists I love who don’t feature in my Top Ten list, simply because they were primarily singles artists. I also don’t like including after-the-fact compilations that weren’t actually created by their artists in real time, but emerged to satisfy label or other commercial considerations. But, those caveats aside, the ten albums I did pick are certainly winners with legs.

I also must make a note about Bob Marley, since many (if not most) people who bother to read this article will immediately see/hear the Chief Wailer in their mental video jukeboxes as soon as I mention the word “Reggae.” There’s certainly no denying the extraordinary skill, talent, and reach of Bob Marley (his early death helped on that front) as the great ambassador for his country’s music, but after decades of over-saturation with his songs (especially the cuts included on the 1984 Legend compilation, one of the all-time best selling albums in history), both in their original recorded versions and by way-too-many crappy bands or dudes with acoustic guitars in bars or clubs, I just really don’t often care to listen to him anymore.

If I had to pick one Bob Marley album to include my Top Ten list, 1977’s Exodus would clearly be the one, but I still wouldn’t chose it above any of the ten that I actually cite below. I recognize that I am an outlying anomaly on this front. And probably a musical heretic. Your results may vary.

MY TEN FAVORITE REGGAE ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Various Artists, Gay Jamaica Independence Time (1970): This obscurity was curated and released by Arthur “Duke” Reid, who owned/operated a joint grocery, liquor store, and recording studio, and was probably a gangster. Marking the eighth anniversary of Jamaica’s independence, the collection provides an excellent, real-time, boots-on-the-ground overview of the crucial years when Rocksteady was transitioning into Reggae.

2. Various Artists, The Harder They Come (Original Soundtrack Recording) (1972): I mentioned this film in my introduction, and its soundtrack stands as one of the most remarkable song collections within the Reggae idiom. Jimmy Cliff is the star of the film and the score, but key cuts from the Maytals, Desmond Dekker, The Melodians, and others make this an essential snapshot of a genre as it exploded into greatness.

3. Toots & The Maytals, Funky Kingston (1973): After giving reggae its name and bolstering the soundtrack to The Harder They Come, Toots Hibbert and his Maytals released their finest album in 1973, kicking off a mid-’70s heyday for LP-length classic Reggae recordings. Nary a duff cut on this short/tight record as it was originally released; the longer same-named American album from 1975 is actually a compilation.

4. Burning Spear, Marcus Garvey (1975): Burning Spear is the pen/stage name of Winston Rodney, one of Jamaica’s great singers, writers, thinkers, and teachers. This masterful album focuses on the life and teachings of Marcus Garvey, a fascinating Pan-Africanist activist, considered a prophet of the Rastafarian religion. A haunting dub version of this album, Garvey’s Ghost, was released in 1976, and is also recommended.

5. Max Romeo and The Upsetters, War Ina Babylon (1976): Of all the influential Reggae/Dub producers, Lee “Scratch” Perry was arguably the greatest; I discuss why in my obituary for him, here. Perry’s house band, The Upsetters, appear on many crucial recordings of the ’70s, including singer Max Romeo’s fourth album, which stands as one of the finest products to be crafted within Perry’s legendary Black Ark Studios.

6. Bunny Wailer, Blackheart Man (1976): Among the original Wailers trio, Bunny received far less global media attention than Peter Tosh or Bob Marley did. But in many ways, he was the spiritual core of the group, the one who remained the truest champion of his Rastafarian beliefs, and (sadly) the only one to live out a long life. Blackheart Man was his solo vocal debut, backed by an A++ assortment of players.

7. Third World, 96° In The Shade (1977): Third World were a self-contained singing-playing-writing-producing ensemble who were founded in 1973, toured Europe with the Wailers in 1975, and were signed to Island Records in 1976. This ’77 sophomore disc is their masterpiece, perfect and fresh to this day. One of their key assets was the exceptional guitar work of Stephen “Cat” Coore, who just died this month. RIP.

8. The Congos, Heart of the Congos (1977): Another Black Ark production by Lee Perry, Heart of the Congos is a quintessential example of “Roots Reggae,” with lyrics focused exclusively on spiritual or social issues, and music leaning toward the acoustic and/or percussive. The Congos were, in ’77, the vocal duo of Cedric Myton and Roy “Ashanti” Johnson; singer Watty Burnett joined later, and the trio continue to make great music.

9. Culture, Two Sevens Clash (1977): Culture leader Joseph Hill had a prophetic vision that 1977 (when “two sevens clash”) would be a global year of judgment, when past injustices would be avenged. His group’s wildly influential debut album laid out his vision of what that clash would look like, atop killer tracks from producer Joe Gibbs, another of Kingston’s great impresarios. The prophecy missed, but the music didn’t.

10. Peter Tosh, Mama Africa (1983): Peter Tosh is definitely the Reggae artist who I’ve listened to the most, and who has moved me the most, over the past half century. Mama Africa was his penultimate studio release, four years before he was murdered, at age 42. The Rolling Stones had signed Tosh to their boutique label in 1977, and that connection helped break his music in the States; this was his best-selling record here.

As I do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other genre favorites to give them setting and context. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for other things that I might find interesting.

(Note: This is one of an occasional and ongoing series of assessments of my favorite albums, parsed by musical genre. Click Here for a series introduction and list of all genres covered, or to be covered, therein).

Background: From 1976 to 1980, I lived on New York’s Long Island, in Nassau County, just a few miles outside of Queens Borough, the easternmost border of New York City, proper. While that era was pretty dire in terms of social, economic, and political happenings in the City, it was an extraordinary era in terms of NYC asserting its primacy as an incubator for some of the most influential and far-reaching music, ever. Punk (in its primal American flavor) was emerging from Manhattan’s Lower East Side, followed by some of the most innovative Post-Punk/No-Wave acts, who remained in the shadows, while their more mainstream/sanitized peers broke into popular consciousness via the record industry’s marketing of New Wave as the next big thing.

At the northern end of the City, in Bronx Borough, another musical wave was building: Hip-Hop/Rap. (While those terms are often used interchangeably, the best distinction I can make between them is that Rap is the rhyming poetry offered by MCs, while Hip-Hop is the broader cultural movement, incorporating fashion, production, artwork, DJing, etc., into a holistic approach to life and its soundtracks). The birth date of Hip-Hop is is generally cited as August 11, 1973, when DJ Kool Herc deployed his unique “Merry-Go-Round” approach at a party he co-hosted with his sister at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. Herc’s critical technique involved a recognition that dancers most enjoyed “the break” (an instrumental, often percussive interlude within the verse/chorus structure of most early funk/soul records), even though those groove-heavy interludes were too short to move a party very long.

Herc solved the problem of the (short) break by deploying two turntables, bouncing between the two, to either extend the break from one song as long as necessary, or to cut between killer breaks from multiple songs. He also used a microphone to exhort the party-goers to move, building on dub/reggae traditions associated with “toasting” atop “sound system” PA/turntable set-ups. (Herc was born in Jamaica, moving to New York City with his family when he was 13 years old). The 1520 Sedgwick party was a cultural hand grenade, the fragments of its concussions rapidly spreading across the Bronx and into the other boroughs, with rival crews of DJs and MCs vying to be the kings/queens of their audio domains.

I wasn’t going into those parts of the City at that time, but having access to local arts coverage did give me an awareness of the burgeoning Hip-Hop scene as something interesting and worthy of exploration before it really broke big, commercially, with The Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the first Rap song to break the Top 40 charts, in late 1979/early 1980. (Reggae’s “toasting” morphed into the American “rapping” as the descriptor for the vocal style, picking up the use of “rap” as a late ’60s/early ’70s term for frank conversation or message-sending between in-the-know individuals). Less than a year later, Blondie scored the first Billboard #1 Hip-Hop inflected song with their disco/rap/rock mash-up, “Rapture.”

I liked both of those songs well enough, at the time, though they both felt a bit like novelty numbers (as evidenced by their self-referential titles), and neither of them really made me feel like I was hearing something musically revelatory, since both were based on familiar rhythms and instrumental sounds, played on traditional instruments. Much more interesting to me were the likes of Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash, who built on DJ Kool Herc’s turntable-based instrumental approach, developing it through early sampling, looping, cutting, and scratching techniques. Flash’s MC posse, The Furious Five, then added trenchant social commentary to the mix with such awesome singles as “White Lines (Don’t Don’t Do It)” and “The Message.” But, personally, it wasn’t until a few years later when I had my own magical “A-HA!” moment, when all of those conceptually interesting pieces came together into a greater whole that blew my mind, entirely. The catalyst for that moment? Public Enemy.

I first heard of (and heard) PE after their debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, dropped in 1987. They received a lot of attention in the music press of the era, and they made me rethink what it meant to be a member of a musical group when I first read about and listened to them, as most of the people who appeared in their press shots of the era didn’t actually sing or play any instruments, in the traditional uses of those verbs. They really cemented their standing as one of my favorite acts a couple of years later, when Marcia and I went to see Spike Lee’s Do The Right Thing (one of my all-time favorite films) in Washington DC on or very near to its release date. That great film opens with Rosie Perez dancing and boxing on the big screen with Public Enemy’s most lasting anthem, “Fight the Power,”  just absolutely kicking!!! It remains the only time I can ever recall an audience clapping, standing, and whooping for a film’s opening credit segment. (You should watch it now).

Hip-Hop culture and Rap music have obviously blossomed globally in a variety of ways in the decades since Do The Right Thing, cross-pollinating with other genres, developing an amazing array of local styles/flavors (both in the United States and abroad), topping the charts with friendly rhythms/flows/melodies, while continuing to challenge, abrade, and inspire in a variety of experimental and underground idioms. I would argue that it vies with metal as the world’s most adaptable and oft-attempted musical idiom, both of them recognizable bridges between cultures and places with no other common bonds between them. It’s a global language at this point, with its critical core meanings communicated by break and flow, regardless of their original languages or rhythmic sources. I’m glad that DJ Kool Herc is still with us, recognized as The Father of Hip-Hop, able to witness the massive magic his pioneering work wrought on the musical world around us.

MY TEN FAVORITE HIP-HOP/RAP ALBUMS EVER (IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)

1. Public Enemy, Fear of Black Planet (1990): As noted in the introduction above, “Fight the Power” was the breakthrough song for me in terms of my deep personal appreciation for Hip-Hop. It came out as a single in 1989, then was included on this album a year later. Fear is brilliant (and still trenchant), lyrically and musically, from open to close; its title song later inspired an essay I wrote called Fear of White Radio.

2. Cypress Hill, Black Sunday (1993): Cypress Hill were the first rap performers of Latin-American descent to trouble the pop music charts, and they were right up there with Snopp Dogg on pioneering the centrality of marijuana within their creative idiom. Black Sunday was their sophomore album, and the one where DJ Muggs really mastered his laconic, yet powerful, approach to crafting beats for stoners to dance to.

3. Cannibal Ox, The Cold Vein (2001): Cannibal Ox featured Vast Aire and Vordul Mega as MCs, with the then-emergent producer El-P (more on him below) handling the beats and beds. The sound of The Cold Vein (the only album the original trio produced) felt radical in its time, as much inspired by motorik, ambient, or art-rock as it was to breaks culled from the Chic back-catalog. It still feels fresh today, due to that innovation.

4. dälek, Absence (2005): New Jersey’s Will Brooks has been leading dälek since the mid-’90s, with a variety of DJs and producers helping him bring his musical visions to life. Brooks has also been one of the most active cross-pollinators in Hip-Hop, working with such legendary non-Hip-Hop artists as Charles Hayward, Faust, Mats Gustafsson, and The Young Gods, making music that sounds like nothing and nobody else, ever.

5. Edan, Beauty and the Beat (2005): Edan Portnoy was raised in the Washington, DC suburbs, the child of Israeli immigrants. He began writing Rap songs in high school, attended (but didn’t graduate from) Berklee College of Music, and released his first disc in 2002. Beauty and the Beat was his sophomore album, and it is filled with wonderful guests, lyrics exploring musical history, and fantastic samples/beats.

6. Mos Def, The Ecstatic (2009): Mos Def was the MC name of Brooklyn’s Dante Terrell Smith; he now uses Yasiin Bey for his creative endeavors, which include music, acting, and activism. Bey first broke into public consciousness as one-half of Black Star, with fellow MC/producer Talib Kweli. The Ecstatic was his fourth solo album, after which he largely walked away from music-making. I gave it my Album of the Year nod in 2009.

7. MF Doom, Unexpected Guests (2009): MF Doom (Daniel Dumile) was a British-American artist (he died in 2020) who is best known as half of Madvillain (with producer Madlib); their 2004 Madvillainy is a regular star of “All-Time Best” lists like this one. As much as I love that disc, I enjoy Unexpected Guests even more, for its masterful culling of 17 brilliant singles featuring Doom in one capacity or another.

8. Death Grips, Government Plates (2013): Death Grips are a California-based trio featuring MC Ride, drummer Zach Hill and keyboardist Andy Morin. (The latter may or may not still be in the group; they are notoriously obscure about sharing news/facts). While their semi-fame is often anchored as much in their obstreperousness as it is in their music, their albums are masterfully dense, powerful, experimental, and strange.

9. Chance the Rapper, Coloring Book (2016): We lived in Chance’s home town, Chicago, from 2015-2019, just as he was breaking huge beyond the Windy City’s confines. Coloring Book is, for me, his absolute masterwork, and it was magic to see the outpouring of Chance love in Chicago at the time, just as he was doing amazing work in giving back to his beloved community. Perfect record, perfect time, perfect place.

10. Run The Jewels, RTJ4 (2020): Another of my Album of the Year entries, RTJ4 is the fourth collaboration between El-P and Killer Mike, who’d first made his name as a guest artist with Outkast. Something magical happens when Mike and El-P work together, a truly sublime synthesis of messages, styles, and sounds. Each of their records has been better than the one preceding it, so here’s hoping for RTJ5, sooner rather than later.

As I will do for each installment in the Genre Delve series, I’ve linked my own personally-curated Spotify playlist related to this article, below. You can sample songs from the albums and artists cited here, and also other genre favorites to give them setting and context. As always, I welcome your thoughts and reactions to my list, and your recommendations or suggestions for other things that I might find interesting.