NPR’s 50 Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Books of the Decade, Part 1

So that was a lot of negativity in a row! A few years ago, I tried to steer the ship into a more positive sort of space. It’s easy to hate things, certainly, but I don’t actually spend that much of my time doing so. The problem is, this is a website focused predominantly on the mechanisms and results of things becoming popular, or at least the effects of that popularity – how we choose to remember things, how we decide what we choose to remember, that sort of thing – and thus, as a result, means I spend a lot of time talking about things that are, well, pretty bad. 

Well, that’s not true. Most of the time I’m talking about things that are fine. Most things are fine. Most things – regardless of medium or form – are made by people who work on them, and then become popular because, even if it’s just through repetition or marketing, people find a way to connect with them, and that’s fine. But it’s hard to have a high exposure to things that are fine and try to find anything to say about them. Our time on this Earth is short, and it’s hard not to notice that, even if most things are fine, that’s not the same as them being good.

So here is a list, compiled by NPR, that I am happy to say, is beyond fine. It’s an excellent list, and pretty much everything on it is excellent, and I have decided to lay aside some time to do nothing but be happy and positive and talk about nice things.

Because nice things are nice. 

So anyway, NPR did a clever thing when they made this list of the best Science Fiction and Fantasy books of the decade – they put out the call for nominations, then gave it to a judging panel¹ who decided if things should be on there. This sort of hybridization is a good way to do it, and I think the list is particularly strong because of it. 

¹ which is, it should be noted, made up of people who are, in fact, each on the list. That’s by design – they’re very transparent at the end of the article about how that goes. 

I, of course, am neither a crowd nor a professional judge. I read a lot, and for the last seven  years² have written about the major awards in the sff field, so I have read a whole bunch of these, either for this site, or on my own time. So I am here to examine what we have here, and generally celebrate it, because it’s a good list, and it’s nice to be nice. 

² which the eagle-eyed among you will note is, in fact, most of the decade

Furthermore, in the interest of maximum positivity, I will also be dispensing with my usual “does it belong here” portion of the examination. They all belong here. They’re all good dogs, for the most part³, and you should read them all. 

³ I will confess that there are a couple of choices that I would not have made. I will not be telling you what they were

Oh, and the judges, in further “making this easier to be positive about” didn’t rank the books, just grouped them into categories, which I’ve included. The categories are, frankly, the silliest part of the whole thing, but let’s not let that get in the way of a good thing here. 

WORLDS TO GET LOST IN

Ann Leckie, The Imperial Radch Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: The wide-faring tale of a ship who is stuck in a humanoid body, and its quest for revenge against the powers that blew up the rest of her um…self. It’s a whole thing. Also, it received a lot of attention for taking place amid a culture that only used female pronouns, which was an interesting technique⁴.

WHY IS IT HERE: It’s an impeccable piece of character building – Breq is clearly a ship and not a person⁴, and the pronouns thing creates just enough friction to make the early building-up parts interesting, but what I think catapults it into the upper echelons is how it really does do all the “outcast assembles a group of ragtag misfits to take on an impossible evil” story beats, and brings it back around in a completely unique way. Plus, Translator Dlique, about whom I would read many books. 

⁴ I bet she’d have a lot to say to Murderbot, or perhaps even more to ART. Come back next week for the explanation of that joke.  

P. Djeli Clark, The Dead Djinn Universe
WHAT IS IT: An alternate history of stories that, I’m going to be honest with you, I didn’t quite realize were all interconnected, because this is one of those things that I don’t pay a tonne of attention to. I’m the worst. 

WHY IS IT HERE: They’re wildly entertaining, and PDC is as good at historical fantasy as anyone is these days. Since everything he writes is both extremely likable and quite engaging, it makes sense that it’s his ongoing series that made it in here. 

Joe Abercrombie, The Age of Madness Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: It’s a sequel series to Abercrombie’s First Law books. As with the not-at-all-related-or-even-similar Discworld books⁵, they’re allowing time and technology to move forward, which is a cool hook. 

⁵ I mean, not-at-all-related except they’re the only books I ever talk about except for whatever I’m writing about

WHY IS IT HERE: The people are in a grimdark place, and Joe Abercrombie is probably the most-established grimdark fantasist going, so his series from this decade was probably a shoo in. 

Fonda Lee, The Green Bone Saga
WHAT IS IT: Some of the books in the “Worlds to get lost in” section are about hte world, and some are about the well-drawn and extensive series of characters. Fonda Lee calls it “The Godfather with Magic and Kung-Fu,” which seems about right. 

WHY IS IT HERE: I am left, at my advanced age, to draw the conclusion that there is a portion of the epic-fantasy-loving crowd that also loves a huge number of characters, and to see the various events of the story from the perspective of them. The first two books (the third comes out later this year) definitely have that covered, with the added bonus that each of the characters is extremely well done, and has their own well-established wants and needs that they are pursuing. It seems like faint praise, but perhaps the most impressive thing about it is how none of it is ever muddy-seeming.

James S.A. Corey, The Expanse
WHAT IS IT: It’s sort of the apotheosis of the long-running space opera story, and covers most of the major bases. It’s also the source material for a long-running and extremely popular television show. 

WHY IS IT HERE: I mean, even without the tv show, The Expanse has long been the space opera that people from all over sf fandom can agree on – it’s very good, and it’s hard to be at all interested in space opera and not have some affection for it, which would tend to both put it on a lot of ballots and give it some extra juice in the eyes of the judges. 

S.A. Chakraborty, The Daevabad Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: More historical fantasy, this about a healer in a magical city full of djinn and stuff.

WHY IS IT HERE: One of the things that didn’t apparently make it through – at least as far as the final voting is concerned – is much by way of romance, which is all over this series, and which I assume is what brings it here. If it seems that I’m being faint here, it’s mostly because I’ve only read one of these, so I have no idea where it ends up going. 

Arkady Martine, Texicalaan
WHAT IS IT: A diplomat arrives to a new job on a space outpost to find everything in disarray, including the political position of just about every character. It’s also about poetry. 

WHY IS IT HERE: This series is in the “Worlds to Get Lost In” section, which is fair, but could have been in several of the categories based on the fact that it’s impeccably written, incredibly moving, and generally just an astonishing achievement on the whole. It’s hard to imagine making this list without it. 

Jo Walton, The Thessaly Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: An extremely high-concept bit of fantasy about Greek gods, and how the world would be assembled if Plato were the architect of it.  

WHY IS IT HERE: Well, it’s very easy to tell people about, and it is, like much of Walton’s work, highly readable to the point of addictivity, so it’s a pretty easy swing. 

V.E. Schwab, Shades of Magic Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: A trilogy about increasingly-scary Londons, each of which exists magically atop the other. 

WHY IS IT HERE: “Gaslamp fantasy” is having something of a moment, and this is probably the best of the adult-focused end of that. 

Robert Jackson Bennett, The Divine Cities Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: In a world where there used to be gods (of the “Elder” persuasion, rather than a more benevolent strain), people are still people, fighting to occupy other people, and the latter set of people rebelling against same. 

WHY IS IT HERE: Well, whatever the reason, I’m happy to see them here. I love this series a great deal, especially the latter two books. That said, Bennett is a terrific writer, and this is an imaginative, exciting series that seems extremely crowd-pleasing while also being utterly unique. 

Tade Thompson, The Wormwood Trilogy
WHAT IS IT: Alien mushrooms land in Nigeria, and the work focuses especially on the titular city, which is gathered around the base of a dome.

WHY IS IT HERE: We are living in boom times for Afrofuturist and Africanfuturist writing, and this is some really good stuff. The aliens are great, and while I haven’t read the end of it, the setup is first-rate. 

Rebecca Roanhorse, Black Sun
WHAT IS IT: There are a lot of books here that are of extremely recent vintage. This one not only is very new, but the whole series is here despite only the first book of it being out. That doesn’t mean that it’s not great – it is – just that there’ a great deal of very recent material that’s really getting people excited, and that’s great. 

WHY IS IT HERE: A sort of Pre-Colombian epic fantasy with shifting narrators that builds constantly before ending on a cliffhanger is a pretty effective way to get people talking about your book. Roanhorse has yet to put a foot wrong, and this series really could stand as a high water mark. 

WORDS TO GET LOST IN
The category, I’m presuming, for when the prose is the real star. I’m very clever. 

Susannah Clarke, Piranesi
WHAT IS IT: Susannah Clarke’s long-awaited follow-up to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, Piranesi is like, everything that JS&N isn’t. It’s short, it’s straightforward, it’s concerned almost entirely with the inner life of one character. The only thing they have in common is that they’re both amazing. 

WHY IS IT HERE: Well, it was anticipated so heavily that it’s something of amiracle that it wasn’t a let-down, but also it really is a book unlike any other, about a person who lives a very strange life in a very strange labyrinth, and it’s nearly impossible to stop thinking about for awhile once it’s finished. Sounds like a reasonable candidate to me. 

Madeline Miller, Circe
WHAT IS IT: Perhaps unsurprisingly, it’s the story of Circe, ordinarily thought of as an extremely twisty and complicated part of the story of Odysseus (and, to a lesser extent, Scylla). This is from her perspective though, which makes it seem somewhat less twisty. 

WHY IS IT HERE: This is, simply put, one of the finest pieces of prose ever assembled, and the fact that it’s doing so in the service of reclaiming a character who exists primarily to be both vilified and occasionally held in contempt is just icing on the cake. 

Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Mexican Gothic
WHAT IS IT: Another recent one, this one a story about mushrooms, and scary small towns, and, you know, extremely uncomfortable family relationships.

WHY IS IT HERE: this is perhaps the most effective bait and switch of the year, and it’s tempting to give it away, but the upshot of it is that, in addition to it being written at Moreno-Garcia’s usual impeccably-high level of prose, it also is genuinely surprising as it starts out looking like one thing, and then leaves a completely different thing on the doorstep. 

Ken Liu, The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
WHAT IS IT: The first collection of short stories by Ken Liu, including the title story, which is not only the only thing to win a Nebula, a Hugo and  a World Fantasy Award, but one of, like, a handful of stories that ever could possibly deserve it. 

WHY IS IT HERE: Ken Liu is incredible, and his ongoing series (The Dandelion Dynasty) is divisive enough that it makes sense that this is what made it in. All of it is very good, but really, the title story is an all-time great piece of fiction. 

Naomi Novik, Spinning Silver
WHAT IS IT: An expansion of an earlier Novik short story, this is a retelling/reimagining of Rumpelstiltskin. 

WHY IS IT HERE: A lot of fantasy in the present day has a bunch of narrators – it’s all over this list – but this is probably my favorite usage of it, as it brings together the stories of the women that are touched by the events of the story, and extends the idea of what happens in the world when this sort of fairy tale takes place to its logical, and extremely narratively satisfying, conclusion. 

Ted Chiang, Exhalation: Stories
WHAT IS IT: Proof that I’m basically the oldest person ever. I thought “oh gosh I’m surprised it isn’t The Story of Your Life and Others, then realized that must have been published more than ten years ago, then saw that it was, in fact, published almost twenty years ago, and then I died and shrivelled up and am now writing this as a desiccated corpse. 

WHY IS IT HERE: Ted Chiang is an incredible writer and, in a rare instance, has, in fact, never written a story that was any less than an A-. So any collection of Ted Chiang stories that came out in any given decade would have made it here. This one is truly amazing, and I wrote about it at length for the World Fantasy Awards last year. 

Sofia Samatar, Olondria
WHAT IS IT: A duology, one of which is about cults, the other about a revolution. It must have gotten some crazy votes, also, because this particular subcategory has a preponderance of short story collections, and Samatar’s is absolutely world-class.

WHY IS IT HERE: Samatar is a wildly incredible writer, who’s able, in fiction of any length, to find the most effective images and blow them up into whole stories. I could read a hundred books set in Olondria and be happy. 

Carmen Maria Machado, Her Body and Other Parties
WHAT IS IT: Another short story collection, some of which are straightforward in their telling, some of which are highly experimental, and one of which is a set of synopsis of fake Law & Order SVU episodes that is, nevertheless, quite possibly the best thing in there. 

WHY IS IT HERE: The only thing better than this is her memoir, and while I think her memoir does, in fact, qualify as fantasy (I know, but you kind of have to read it to understand), I get why this is what made it in. She doesn’t have a particularly wide body of work, but all of it is excellent, and much of it is collected here. 

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant
WHAT IS IT: If I weren’t keeping this positive, I would point out that this shouldn’t be included, because despite the giant and the knight and the magic and the Arthurianism and all that, Ishiguro belligerently insisted that it wasn’t fantasy, and I’m salty about it. 

WHY IS IT HERE: I mean, no matter how salty I get, this is a truly incredible novel, and Ishiguro is another writer that just never gets it wrong, even when he’s being kind of a jerk about the genre his novel is assigned.

Catherynne Valente, Radiance
WHAT IS IT: Actually, the case for having the judges make the final decisions about this sort of thing made itself known here: Valente’s Space Opera got more votes, but the judges thought this was a better book. They’re somewhat similar, but this one is about filmmakers in space, and actually is a little less whacky. I don’t know that I’d have made the same decision as the judges, but any Valente is good Valente. 

WHY IS IT HERE: I mean, filmmakers in space, dude. I mean, it’s actually filmmakers in space in the mid-eighties, which is even wilder. How are you not reading it right now? What do I have to do to convince you? 

WILL TAKE YOU ON A JOURNEY

Because travelling, geddit? I mean, most of these are, in fact, journey stories. That’s funny. 

Victor Lavalle, The Changeling
WHAT IS IT: I maintain that, whatever else one says, and I love this book deeply, it is the best book that takes as its premise a pun. To wit: what if an internet troll was a real troll? 

WHY IS IT HERE: This one really could have also been in the world category, as the Weird New York it presents is genuinely super-engaging. It goes to a bunch of places, takes some turns, then really earns its happy ending, and really, what more could you want? 

Becky Chambers, Wayfarers
WHAT IS IT: A series of novels that share a world, if not always characters (but sometimes characters) about a universe in which people have adventures and endeavor to be good people, and to make their various societies better in the doing. 

WHY IS IT HERE: In a list about which I’m speaking only of positivity, this is some of the most positivity-focused work being done in the genre, without forsaking cool shit and great big adventures. My only complaint is that Dr. Chef is only in one book, when obviously he should be in every single book on this list, even the ones that Becky Chambers didn’t write. 

Nnedi Okorafor, Binti
WHAT IS IT: In which a girl becomes the first of her people to get accepted into a prestigious intergalactic university, then gets merged with aliens in a tragic attack, and then has to both bring peace and cope with, you know, having been merged with an alien. 

WHY IS IT HERE: The blurb on the NPR website suggests that it’s here despite its third volume, which I disagree with pretty vehemently: I think the third book is different, but no worse, and that the whole series works together to tell a cohesive story in a way that series of novellas don’t always do. 

Mary Robinette Kowal, The Lady Astronaut
WHAT IS IT: In an alternate past where an asteroid means the world has a much shorter time to get it together, the space program takes on a very different role, and this series is the tale of the women who help the Earth get it together. 

WHY IS IT HERE: It’s very hard not to like, honestly, and while it isn’t quite on the same level as the short story that kicked it all off (“The Lady Astronaut of Mars,” which is honestly one of the best works of short fiction ever written), it’s all very well done, and the thing that makes it most impressive is how well thought-out everything is: every detail seems to follow logically, and while that means there’s some real highs and lows, it also means that everything hangs together satisfyingly. 

Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Time
WHAT IS IT: One of the rare horror-tinged examples of the field to make it onto the list. This is also a science fiction novel that takes its biology very seriously – it concerns a virus that is meant to evolve monkeys into workers and instead evolves monsters into um…scarier monsters. 

WHY IS IT HERE: There is an audience for scarier sf, as well as biologically-themed sf, and, well, this is the thing that got us here. Well, this and the not-actually-similar Southern Reach books, but you’ll have to read about those next week. 

Seanan McGuire, Wayward Children
WHAT IS IT: It centers around a school for kids that have traveled through portals to other worlds, and then come back. Each book is somewhat different – although there’s a couple devoted to two of the characters in particular – and they’re all excellent. 

WHY IS IT HERE: McGuire does long series of short books as a sort of rule, and these are the best of her work at a walk. Incidentally, of all the series here that I’m an active consumer of, this is the one where the shortest amount of time elapses between “release of the book” and “me reading it”. I love these books very, very much. 

Micaiah Johnson, The Space Between Worlds
WHAT IS IT: A high-concept book (parallel worlds that you can only visit if your self in that world is dead) that really seems to have captured people’s attention. 

WHY IS IT HERE: People sure do love it! I would love to say more, but I haven’t read a word of it. It’s also extremely recent. But it’s a debut novel with a terrific premise and a lot of excellent press, so I’m not surprised, exactly, to see it here.

NEXT WEEK: Our heads and feelings are um “messed with” and all that. Stay tuned!

Who the Fuck Watches This: Cooking with Paris

So, we made it all the way to the Cooking With Paris portion of society. It’s probably a good thing that we don’t have much time left as a species, right? Jesus. 

Anyway. 

To get to Cooking with Paris, we first have to spend some time discussing Paris Hilton, because this Netflix television program is at the far end¹ of a whole thing with her. You know the basics: she was a model for Donald Trump’s modelling agency, then she worked her way into a job as the star of a reality show back when those were new, and right before then, her sex tape was leaked², and she, rather than anything else, immediately became famous for having a sex tape. 

¹ or, more likely, given the ouroboric nature of the career of P. Hilton, one of the many parts of the middle of a whole thing. 

² I will not, in this space, be talking about the sex tape, which is almost twenty years old as of the time of this writing, nor will I be casting aspersions on her version of events, mostly because, as I’ll try to flesh out in a minute, it doesn’t fucking matter. 

Here’s the upshot of all that: people hated Paris Hilton. I mean, if you weren’t around and aware at the time, it’s difficult to express the level of absolute ugly hatred that was ejected at this woman. She was a series of SNL jokes, of late-night jokes, of internet forum posts, of everything, and none of what was said about her was anything but pure, straight misogynistic ugliness. Patton Oswalt, who is ordinarily a guiding light through the darkness, had a whole bit on Werewolves and Lollipops about how he got fired from a job because he couldn’t help himself from expressing some sort of “raped-to-death” fantasy about Paris Hilton. That’s how deep this went. 

I’m not here to justify any of this. It was hideous, it was inexcusable, and the sheer amount of it is more than enough to drive anyone into all sorts of uninhabitable mental spaces. Whatever my socioeconomic upbringing, whatever my attitude toward myself, I cannot imagine bearing up under half of what Paris Hilton was subjected to in the light of her sex tape/reality show/continual fame.

Thing is, there were plenty of reasons to actually not like Paris Hilton. Like, tonnes of them. She was insulated from any consequence of her actions by her wealth and last name. She spent most of her time in the actual spotlight spewing racist and homophobic language (Jezebel’s Rich Juzwiak has a comprehensive and excellent round-up of all that here), and she never seemed to get caught up in the same maelstroms that brought down so many of the people that she was hanging around at the time. It all seems gross, and like she should not, in fact, be a public figure, and should just sit back and continue to make money and let the rest of us do without a Paris Hilton in the world. It’d be that easy. That’s the thing about insane privilege: it means you don’t, in fact, have to deal with anything you don’t want to. 

So, of course, everything that Paris Hilton has done for what amounts to my entire adult life comes as part of a dichotomy: she is awful, and has earned precisely nothing of what she’s made. In one of the interviews she tells Marie Claire that she wants “people to know that I’m grown-up…a responsible businesswoman. [She] works very hard. [She’s] down-to- earth. Nothing has been handed to [her]”, and thus, that she has not gained even an ounce of the self-awareness necessary to believe that she has anything like a clue about how to be repentant, not for the things for which she was blamed, but for the things she actually did. But of course, the other side of the dichotomy is that people think she should be sorry for a bunch of shit that, in fact, is not actually bad. 

To reiterate: I do not think she needs to repent for having sex at 19, I do not think she needs to repent for being skinny and blonde and on television. I think it’s the racism, and the hurting people, and the denial of her unimaginable privilege, and the generally just being awful all the time, in a social sense.

This is also not going to touch very much on her relationship with Donald Trump, with whom she is, in a lot of ways, inextricable, except to point out that he is the locus of several of her more recent displays of sociopathic privilege. It started when she talked about voting for him for president, which makes a kind of sense: she’s rich, and he’s an old family friend³. She then turned around and denied that she voted for Donald Trump, but that he was “an incredible businessman” who would be a good president⁴. All of that is what it is, but she also continues on to say that the women who have accused him of sexual assault can only possibly be doing so for the attention and publicity. 

³ also, as previously noted, she is awful

⁴ this is all in the Marie Claire interview above. 

To clarify once more: sexual-assault-denialism is hideous, and anyone who engages in it is human garbage. Paris Hilton is, once more, unrepentant, unreformed garbage. Just not because she made a sex tape or was on television. Because of the actual things she thinks and says. You know, the human parts. She’s bad at the human parts.

So anyway, despite all of this, at the end of last year, when we were all energized from Monica Lewinsky and Tonya Harding and Mariah Carey and Jessica Simpson and everyone sort of generally deciding the parade of late-nineties/early-oughts villain women should be healed, Paris entered the chat, in the form of a documentary, This is Paris, which had been assembled by the director of the Hedy Lamar documentary called Bombshell⁵, and eventually released on YouTube.

⁵ this is not the same as the concomitant Adam McKay movie, which is why that’s worded so weirdly

The documentary was an attempt to reframe the public perception of Paris, and it’s from the press tour for the documentary that most of the interviews and publicity that make up the links in this piece are pulled. It centers itself – the publicity does, I mean – around the period of Paris’s life in which she was sent to a brutal, dehumanizing school in Provo to turn her life around and stop partying⁶. She eventually becomes involved with the folks behind #breakingcodesilence, and aligns herself with trying to pull this all down. 

⁶ editorially, I should say that the fact that it failed so spectacularly is enough, in and of itself, to eliminate this sort of school, even if you believe that torturing children into compliance isn’t, you know, hideous monster shit. 

To be clear: this is the point at which I started actually paying attention. If Paris Hilton is going to use her name ‘n’ fame to bring to light a series of schools designed to brutalize children, and get them shut down, then I’m behind it. If people gave to the associated charities after watching the documentary, then good was done, and I’ve no actual complaint about that. If it takes something happening to Paris Hilton herself for her to think it’s important, then, well, she’s no different than a whole bunch of other people. Hurray for the documentary, hurray for the decision, hurray for the fundraising, hurray for the visibility, hurray for the charity. 

That’s why I never wrote one of these for the documentary. The reason to watch the documentary may vary from person to person, but even I’m not going to say that someone’s attempt to make something terrible go away is bad, even if it’s couched in a weird reputation-saving thing. Fine. Good for her. She did a good thing, and I’m happy about it. We are all human, we all contain multitudes. Well bowled, Hilton. 

Also, as part of the run-up to all that⁷ she posted a video of herself “making” “lasagna” as part of an ostensible series called “Cooking with Paris”. It was….weird and terrible? But also it seemed like the sort of ephemeral thing that was impossible to get too worked up over, because what on Earth could she even be doing? It got passed around, some of us who are inclined to discuss such things discussed it, it was weird, we all moved on. 

⁷ actually, I’m not a part of PH’s publicity team, so I have no idea if this was part of the run-up to that, or just a totally independent wild hair. I’m also not particularly interested in finding out

The thing is, promotional consideration for the documentary or not, it’s that initial video that renders this whole thing absolutely inessential: we already know what all this looks like, and adding some famous friends doesn’t make it any better. But I’m getting ahead of myself here. 

⁸ it did have a follow-up, but really, the word-count here is out of control and I haven’t even gotten to the ostensible subject of the piece

So, the show then. It arrived on Netflix one day, a couple of weeks ago, and everyone thought of lasagna, and then, if they were normal and sane, they put on Schitt’s Creek or the Love is Blind reunion thing or whatever, and they forgot about it. But, of course, I saw an opportunity: this is so weird, and so absolutely useless as a piece of televisual entertainment, that I simply had to know. 

To start with: the show contains almost no cooking. If things are cooked, it is by charming happenstance or, rarely, the know-how of the guest. If you were looking to learn how to cook something, this is not the thing you need. Here is the one thing someone does that you may want to incorporate into your repertoire: Saweetie⁹ juices a couple of limes and then tosses the juiced-out husks into the pan with the shrimp. Interesting, unorthodox and extremely Filipina. That’s my kind of cooking advice. That’s it. Nothing else is worth mentioning, as far as kitchen technique goes. Don’t prepare food in fingerless sliving gloves, don’t rinse your turkey in bottled water, don’t feed your dog caviar off a spoon, stay away from edible glitter, and learn what “a tong” is. 

⁹ something of a ringer, given how much of her social media presence is devoted to her cooking already

Part of this is, of course, because it’s what we expect from Paris Hilton after two decades. The Simple Life is littered with moments of bonkers out-of-touch-ness (“What’s a Walmart,” the bit about not knowing what a laundromat is, that sort of thing), and her whole public persona is built¹⁰ around being so wrapped in the Paris-bubble that we aren’t surprised when she can’t do stuff. In fact, so much is done by the guest that this is less “Cooking with Paris” and more “doing stuff to varying degrees of efficacy while Paris is also in the kitchen”¹¹.

¹⁰ not to get ahead of myself, but the documentary doesn’t appear to have had a lasting effect on this one 

¹¹ which is, admittedly, not as snappy a title

But, as often happens with vanity food projects¹², and, in fact, in the sort of oeuvre of Paris Hilton¹³, we learn a lot more about Paris than she intends. Despite all of her mewling about how she never showed anyone the real her, we see it: when tasked to come up with six different dishes for her television series, she ended up on “cereal-heavy breakfast,” “tacos,” “burgers,” “Italian,” “Christmas” and “steak”. It would ordinarily be easy enough to chalk this up to inexperience, but it’s also clear that “coming off as someone who can effectively make this food” is not one of the objectives for the show, so we’re sort of left to imagine that this is just the sort of pedestrian, unthoughtful faire that PH is into consuming¹⁴. 

¹² and let me tell you, I am something of an armchair expert in vanity food projects, given how often they combine my loves of food and people interacting with their own fame

¹³ there will be some more of this at the end 

¹⁴ which is fine! Lots of people are not curious about food or whatever, and eat just like this. This is an argument for why Paris shouldn’t be given a cooking show, not an argument against eating whatever the fuck you want. 

On an individual-episode level, the show is heavily guest-dependent. Lele Pons, in the fifth episode, seems basically superfluous, waggling her hands around and not really doing much, even when faced with “Make Kraft mac and cheese, but add a fuckload more cheese to it.” It’s the worst episode by far. Nikki Glaser fares slightly better¹⁵, although she just as surely fails to make burgers out of crumbled Beyond meat, and that episode is perhaps the hardest to watch. Saweetie seems to be making the best of it all, and does by far the best job cooking.  

¹⁵ I don’t want to pile on anyone, but the descent of Nikki Glaser, who used to be a joy and light unto the world, into a sort of distaff Joel McHale (about whom I could say the exact same) is a tremendous disappointment

The half of the season that almost makes it into “interesting” territory are the people with whom Paris seems to have the closest personal relationship with. That’s telling. Demi Lovato, whom I genuinely believe is Paris Hilton’s friend, although I genuinely cannot fathom why, seems to really enjoy being in the kitchen with Paris, and their joy¹⁶ at being there is, while baffling, at least a break in the monotony. Paris’s former personal assistant Kim Kardashian is at least somewhat capable in the kitchen, to the extent that actual food gets actually made, and they are also clearly enjoying being around each other. 

¹⁶ that is to say, Demi’s joy. Paris approaches the episode with the exact same motionless flat affect as she does literally everything else she’s ever done in public. 

It’s hard not to over-analyze the final episode, in which Paris tries to make her family’s favorites (steak, caviar and um…well, it’s a wedge salad on the menu and just a regular-old “iceberg lettuce salad” by the time it’s made). There’s clearly a fucked up family dynamic going on there, and while I’m not an analyst, and have never met any of the three women involved, if that’s at all indicative of how they interact as a family, then perhaps they shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths Paris would go to for attention. I’m not going to dwell on it, except to point out that, for all that most of the show is dull and boring, this episode is dull and deeply uncomfortable, and that’s without even counting the bit where a dog eats caviar off a spoon. Just a reminder: there’s hardly any sturgeon left. Because of snacks. 

Strip away the guests, and all you’re left with is a sort of pile of Paris-isms. She’s constantly “sliving,” she retains saying “loves” as a reaction to seeing something she likes (a holdover from her The Simple Life days). The last time I heard anyone describe anything as “sick” as often as Paris Hilton does, a Slipknot record was involved. I never quite got the hang of her use of the word “Beyond”, which seems usually to mean very bad, but occasionally might mean very good, or else I don’t understand what Paris thinks is bad/good¹⁷. Food is often festooned with logos for fashion houses, for no reason other than, you know, Paris. She explains her gloves a bunch of time, and often has to wear gloves over the gloves. She uses bottled water for so many things that I’m pretty sure the sink is only actually used once. 

¹⁷ this latter being not only possible, but extremely likely. 

For all that this is meant to be a lighthearted look at the ineptitude of a rich person who’s more concerned with gloves than turkey, and without overstepping my earlier insistence that I wasn’t analyzing things, there’s a pretty stark and apparent look at Paris’s interior life. Her clear disgust with not only doing things for herself, but the very idea of the preparation of food – the paroxysms that the turkey alone is responsible for, yes, but also having to cover all of the finished products in logos/glitter/gold leaf/seriously so much glitter, seemingly so as to divroce it all from its actual intended purpose – is apparent throughout, and really, just about once an episode she mentions her intention to have children soon, a girl named London and a boy whose name has not yet been selected¹⁸. The children refrain is so insistent, in fact, that it is easy to assume that it’s the ulterior motive for all this: to clean up her image and make herself into something that wouldn’t make people gasp in horror at the idea of her being responsible for the care and upbringing of a human child. 

¹⁸ eventually it comes out that Paris is preparing for IVF, and believes that you can select traits for a child so produced, and which is also going to be part of the focus of her upcoming Peacock series, about which you can absolutely, definitively not expect to read about in this space, because oh god fuck all of this forever. 

It’s the only time that the show successfully centers itself on the ostensible star – the tragic parts, I mean. Every episode opens with Paris pretending to buy food, and then cuts to her describing to the team of people she has decorating her place the way she wants it elaborately set up for what amounts to the final shots¹⁹, and at least twice per episode, because, again, they’re all very dull, I wonder how those people were doing, and how much better a show would be about a put-upon catering team that had to set up an event space for someone that wanted something very specific in an extremely short period of time. Sort of a Project Runway for catering setups²⁰. Much better show. You can get Nikki Glaser to host it. I hear she’s available. 

¹⁹ heartbreakingly, one of these times includes Paris demanding that they do up the space a la a hoity-toity red sauce place where they’ve named a dish after Paris’s father (fried calamari) and Paris’s sister (a chopped salad, which, what?), but not Paris. I’m not an analyst and I’m not going to go any further down this road, but holy jesus that’s bleak. 

²⁰ feel free to call me to offer me a bunch of money, The Intellectual Property Corporation

The reviews are about as negative as this is, if not moreso. It seems that there was no demand for this thing at all, and, perhaps most interestingly, that Paris’s redemption tour isn’t actually working. The only outlets that reported favorably on her documentary were the ones that she could clearly have someone call someone and smooth it all over, so they only talked about the things she was already pointing at. The evidence here being that this show is so slapdash and perfunctory that if anyone were actually convinced she could be back in the public’s good graces, this show would be anything else. The fact that there’s another reality show on the horizon²¹ shows that her cachet was enough to get a couple of seasons of something out of…whatever it is she’s doing, but I don’t think six Netflix episodes and a reality show on Peacock are the same as a grand rehabilitation. 

²¹ I guess technically I lied back there when I said I’d never mention it again, huh? 

The show is sort of emblematic of the thing about Paris Hilton. The Guardian, in their review of This is Paris, mention that she thinks of today’s form of celebrity as something that she created. This is natural, and seems like it makes sense, but it’s easier to understand (and perhaps more accurately) as not something that Paris Hilton did, but as something that happened to Paris Hilton. That Paris Hilton was the right-shaped peg for the hole that the culture opened up at the right time – it was always going to be someone, and it certainly matters that it was Paris Hilton, and not anything else. Water in a puddle believes that the depression in the ground was made for it, when really, it just happens to be made up of the water that fills the depression in the ground. This has been Paris’s whole entire career, in both the abstract sense (she shows up to dj places and gets paid millions of dollars despite not doing her own mixing, let alone live) and in the literal sense (the premise of The Simple Life was literally “Paris and Nicole show up, and then we see what happens). The fact that it extends, fractally, to even this weird little show is not anything out of the ordinary. 

Paris Hilton has always been smarter than most of her detractors, while also not being as smart as she wants you to think she is. She’s always been in on the most obvious parts of the joke, while missing the wider point about it all. This show is, if nothing else, a sort of apotheosis of her whole raison. That does not, however, make it interesting or worth seeing. 

Because perhaps the only real achievement of Paris Hilton is that she’s managed to make being her so mind-bogglingly dull. The television show is terrible, because she is terrible. The television show is boring, because she is boring. The television show is frustrating, because she is frustrating. The television show is covered in glitter, because she is covered in glitter. It is a perfect reflection of its host, and, as such, only deserves the amount of space you’d give any other Paris Hilton endeavor. Which is to say: probably none.

I’m not of the conspiracy theorist type, but I would like to posit one here today. The folks that made this show include Eli Holzman, who runs the aforementioned Intellectual Property Company²², which also produces the absolutely delightful Selena + Chef for HBO Max. The latter is a lovely show in which a young woman earnestly, and with much charisma, learns from actual chefs how to make very specific foods, all while be heckled and/or assisted by her friends. Every episode begins with Selena turning on the cameras, and lighting the stoves, unpacking ingredients, and generally showing willing. She is not wearing fingerless gloves. It’s everything you could want from any of this, and it’s a genuinely worthwhile way to spend some television-watching time. 

²² he’s also the CEO of Industrial Media, so never let it be said that television-production acumen is the same as being good at naming a business

I offer this as evidence that Eli Holzman does know how to make a good celebrity-cooking-focused televisions how, and is just annoyed at Paris Hilton and wants to make her look bad, and there is no force on Earth that will move me off this position. Even if she doesn’t come off any worse than she did before²³ , she definitely doesn’t come off any better. 

²³ and, to be clear, she really doesn’t, she’s still just generally awful

So who the fuck watches this? Well, presumably Donald Trump would find something to like²⁴, but other than that, hopefully no one ever. The world is full of all sorts of shiny, entertaining garbage, why waste time on the dull, overworked stuff? 

²⁴ Paris Hilton even cops to eating ketchup on her steak, to the horror of her mother, which I have to assume is some sort of coded message to The Donald. 

A Considered Look at the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time, Part 9

So, an ongoing feature of the site for the last few years has been a series of posts taking a Considered Look at various and sundry lists of things, and in this particular instance, Rolling Stone has delivered unto me A List, and the prospect of sinking the ol’ chompers into an arbitrary list of a once-dominant institution’s picks for greatness is simply too much to bear.

The list is exactly the sort of high-minded ridiculousness that I’m deeply enthralled by. They touted that they had 300 people vote in a staggered points-assigning system, with several thousand albums in consideration, and tabulated it numerically. 

So does this mean it’s a reasonable version of a consensus list? Do they succeed? Does what they’re doing even make sense? Let’s find out!

I’ll be evaluating every album – all 500 of them – to let you all know exactly how right or wrong the folks that return Rolling Stone’s calls are

Links to the previous sections are here: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8. Previous Considered Looks can be found here and here.

Shania Twain – Come On Over
WHAT IT IS: An album that never fails to give me painful flashbacks. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: I think I mentioned this when I looked at the best-selling albums of all time, but this is one that is just really hard to explain just how everywhere this album was. It had hits in all kinds of different formats, a bunch of highly-successful music videos all over tv, the whole nine yards. This thing was everywhere all the time constantly, so it stands to reason that it would be someone’s favorite, and get voted into this thing. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: Reader, it is not. 

BB King – Live at the Regal
WHAT IT IS: Kind of a magna carta of electric blues, this has been on these lists for longer than I’ve been alive. It’s a deeply-beloved BB King record, is what I’m saying. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: In addition to it being a live record, which means that it has more of the life that BB King tended to lose somewhat in the recording studio, it’s also kind of the one you can point to if someone asks about a single-album BB King experience. It was constructed as a show, so it flows together and all that, and sticks out as a reasonable choice for an electric blues album. It’s also abetted by being something of an avatar for the genre: especially in the mid-sixties, albums as such weren’t the general format for blues music¹, so this is the one that stuck out. 

¹ there’s probably a lot to say about which genres took to full-length albums from singles in what order, but, you know, I’m trying to keep the word count down

BUT IS IT GREAT: BB King’s music is wildly not my thing, but it’s as good as any of that gets, more-or-less

Tom Petty – Full Moon Fever
WHAT IT IS: the first record under Tom Petty’s name, despite it having a bunch of Heartbreakers and a bunch of Traveling Wilburys on it. I think it’s also the final album that Roy Orbison appears on. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: People love Tom Petty. I cannot explain or account for this, but they do. People go on and on about how much they love Tom Petty. I am not one of these people, but I am aware that they exist, and this seems as logical and reasonable a candidate for inclusion as any Tom Petty record, I guess. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: No

Peter Gabriel – So
WHAT IT IS: The rare non-self-titled Peter Gabriel record

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: If you know any Peter Gabriel songs, but have never listened to an album (that is you only know them from an algorithm/the radio), it is probably on this album. This one has the hits. Including the John Cusack one. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s ok. Solo Peter Gabriel is never actually my thing. No one who was in Genesis went on to do anything that I’d call “good” after Peter Gabriel left Genesis, including other Genesis records. Genesis. 

Neil Young – Rust Never Sleeps
WHAT IT IS: So Neil Young ended the greatest seven-run album in human history by putting out, in this order: a sort of semi-album full of stuff that didn’t quite make the aforementioned greatest seven-album run in human history (American Stars ‘n’ Bars), a deeply unnecessary collaboration with Stephen Stills (Long May You Burn), a best-of (Decade), a deeply sad folk album (Comes a Time) and, finally, a live album that sounds like his attempt to set the world on fire all at once. This is that last one. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: It is, undoubtedly, one of the greatest live albums ever made. It’s one of the greatest albums ever made. I am, if you’ve been following along, a great big ol’ Neil Young fan, and this is my second-favorite Neil Young album. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s the greatest. It should be much higher. I cannot say enough good things about this record. 

Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
WHAT IT IS: It turned out to be the final Daft Punk album

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: There are two Daft Punk records on this list. This is the more recent one – this is the one with “Get Lucky” and ONAT favorite “Giorgio by Moroder” on it. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It is, actually. It’s also just about in the right spot on the list, more or less. Probably. 

Weezer – Weezer
WHAT IT IS: The only good Weezer album. Feel free to come at me, Pinkerton fans, but remember: I used to be one of you, and now I’m embarrassed that I ever felt anything but embarrassment at the content of that record. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: It may be hard to believe, theoretical young person, but there really was a time when Weezer were a great band that was exciting to be a fan of. This is the only album of theirs on the list², and that’s just about right. It’s still one hell of a record, no matter what’s going on with Rivers these days. 

² meaning that I’m not the only person whose opinion of Pinkerton has curdled over time

BUT IS IT GREAT: Yes

The Breeders – Last Splash
WHAT IT IS: The biggest album by Kim Deal’s second band

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: You know, The Breeders are another of those things that have frightfully, intensely loyal fans who are deeply enthusiastic about their music. I like them, certainly, but not with the same passion as their fanbase. In any event, Last Splash is their biggest album, but probably also their worst. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: Not actually, but Pod could probably make it in. 

Van Halen – Van Halen
WHAT IT IS: The first album by Van Halen. Also, I expected there’d be more than one Van Halen album on here, and I’m pleasantly surprised to find that there is not. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Van Halen were huge, and people like them. This is one of those albums that I just don’t have any particular insight about, and neither, do I think, does anyone else. If Van Halen is your brand of fun, then I bet this really works for you. It does not work for me, not one little bit. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s not even good. 

Destiny’s Child – The Writing’s On the Wall
WHAT IT IS: The second Destiny’s Child album, and the one with the lion’s share of their enormous hits. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: HITS. I said their enormous HITS. Get your minds out of the gutter, idiots. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s as good as any Destiny’s Child record, I suppose. 

OutKast – Speakerboxxx/The Love Below
WHAT IT IS: OutKast are in that rarest of coincidental circumstances: a group whose biggest hit (which is, in this case, “Hey Ya!”) came out after their Greatest Hits record.

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: You could think of this album as the end of OutKast’s “prime”. You could also, as I do, think of it as the first OutKast record in which things really fly apart. While it’s got some good stuff on it, it’s too long, it was clearly and openly structured as two separate concomitant records. But it’s the one with “Hey Ya!” on it, and also the RS500 is weirdly soft on albums that could be great if you just chopped huge whacks of them out of the mess. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: The strongest parts of it are great, certainly, but there’s too much of it, and while it can be impressive to hear all of at a go, it’s also not something worth going back to in a lot of cases. 

Bjork – Post
WHAT IT IS: Bjork’s second album, as well as her most commercially successful album. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: This is probably the Bjork album upon which you can get the largest number of people to agree. The other album on the list is Homogenic, which I agree is better, and which I’ll get to later, but I can imagine there’d be some argument there⁵. Anyway, it’s the Bjork album with all the Bjork songs you’ve heard of, which we’re learning here is the way to get into the high two-hundreds on this list. 

⁵ this is leaving aside the absence of Vulnicura and Vespertine from the list, which is a stupid travesty

BUT IS IT GREAT: It sure is

The Modern Lovers – The Modern Lovers
WHAT IT IS: It’s the only actual Modern Lovers album made (well, insofar as it was made) by the initial version of the band. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Well, I haven’t had an album with an easy-to-remember story attached to it in awhile, but this is one of those. The recordings on this album were never actually meant to be an album, and then they turned into one, basically by dint of the band never actually being able to re-record them, for varying biographical reasons. This is probably for the best, as Jonathan Richman almost immediately wanted to make them quieter and more folksier, and that would have done incalculable damage to “Roadrunner,” which is probably his finest and most noble contribution to the world. Anyway, the recordings as they were released would go on to have enormous influence, especially over punk rock bands from the East Coast of the United States and from the UK. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s not long enough to be bogged down, but it’s all kind of overshadowed by “Roadrunner.” “She Cracked” is probably under-rated as a result, and I’d say, in the main, that yeah, it’s great. But seriously, there are very few things on Earth better than “Roadrunner” 

The Byrds – Mr. Tambourine Man
WHAT IT IS: The first Byrds album

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: If Dylan’s own Bringing it All Back Home is ground zero for the folk-rock movement of the late-sixties, then this album, which took its name from the band’s cover of a song from Bringing it Back Home, is the first example of something wholly conceived as and within folk-rock, specifically. It’s got as many Gene Clark songs as anything else, which means it’s also the album they made before the label started trying to position Roger McGuinn as the front of the band, which would eventually push Gene Clark out, which would ultimately end in an open spot for Gram Parsons, which I’ll get to the next time the Byrds come up on this list. Anyway, big important album for folk rock, sold a bunch of copies, several songs that ended up staples of classic rock radio. Pretty open and shut case for this one. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It is, especially the Gene Clark bits. 

Red Hot Chili Peppers – Californication
WHAT IT IS: Well, it’s a couple of things in the context of RHCP. It marked the return of John Frusciante after a terrible album without him, so it had a bit of a comeback story to it. It’s also the first album where Anthony Kiedis reversed the usual ratio of “party songs” to “mystic garbage songs”.

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Those things combined to make it super-prominent, certainly. Recent cultural context has meant that I’m now sort of stuck considering that they made their bit to be serious veteran rock dudes with serious stuff to say, like, ten months before Woodstock 99, but that’s a quirk of the time we’re in now more than anything else. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: Not really

Big Star – Third/Sister Lovers
WHAT IT IS: The second record to appear on this set of the list that was, technically, never actually finished. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: After making two albums definitely and inarguably as members of Big Star, Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens, abetted by Jim Dickinson, went into a recording studio and, either as an unnamed group or as “Sister Lovers” made some songs. The label rejected them, the album was only stopped because the studio engineer told them it oughta be, and also because Alex Chilton and Jody Stephens both lost interest in the songs entirely. The fact that several of the songs were beautiful and soul-crushing makes that story more resonant, and the result is the third Big Star album, which is barely an album (having barely achieved a release), is probably not actually Big Star, and is only “third” if the first two things are true. Which they aren’t. So there you have it, everybody. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It is genuinely one of my favorite records ever made. There’s nothing else like it. 

Merle Haggard – Down Every Road
WHAT IT IS: An enormous, cross-label, career-spanning box set. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Merle Haggard wrote a whole lot of great songs, and since we’re exploiting the box set loophole here, I guess it’s technically possible to get them all in one place. This is probably handy for Merle’s legacy, as he wrote most of his best material in an extremely singles-based idiom and era, which would make any given album a real long shot for inclusion. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: Yep. It’s just a box set, not an album. 

Donna Summer – Bad Girls
WHAT IT IS: Donna Summer’s (and Giorgio Moroder’s) biggest album

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Well, Donna Summer’s biggest album is probably, by extension, disco’s biggest album, and it’s probably the genre’s high point. Since we’re in the middle of a full-on disco revival situation, which was getting underway a couple of years ago when the voting for this list happened, by gum, here we are. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: No, but I do like some of the Giorgio Moroder parts. 

Frank Sinatra – In the Wee Small Hours
WHAT IT IS: It’s often cited as being one of the first “concept albums,” although really, the concept is just “sad about girls”, so take that for what it’s worth. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: People love Frank, against all accountability, and this has the aforementioned “first concept album” thing to give it a hook, so here it is, predictably. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: No

Harry Nilsson – Nilsson Schmilsson
WHAT IT IS: It’s an album that starts with the song from Russian Doll and goes on to include “Coconut,” so shout out to an album that can irritate me twice. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: So, the low two-hundreds⁶ are a kind of uninteresting part of this list. It’s inevitable. There’s a bunch of albums that are here because the artist is beloved, and they have a most-prominent album. In some cases (which you can see throughout), I have something to say about the way the record hit the world or hit my ears or something. I am not a Harry Nilsson fan, as such, although I understand why one would be. This seems as logical a choice for the album that would get voted into the situation as any, and I have very little argument with any of that. So here it is. 

⁶ and this will sort of persist for awhile

BUT IS IT GREAT: No album with “Coconut” on it could possibly be great. No. 

50 Cent – Get Rich or Die Tryin’/
WHAT IT IS: Whatever else is going on here, this album has contributed to both a terrific Chris Rock bit and a terrific gag in an episode of The Boondocks, so its impact on comedy is incalculable. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: “In Da Club” brings it here. I mean, there’s a lot that could be said about the cultural impact of Eminem, and the stranglehold on radio rap that Dr Dre was capable of exerting, and 50 Cent’s place in that. He had the backstory, he had the image, he had all the press the world could give him but, really, he had “In Da Club,” which is why this is here. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s probably better than you’d think if you’d only heard “In Da Club,” but none of it is anywhere near as good as “In Da Club”.

Nirvana – MTV Unplugged in New York
WHAT IT IS: Biographically, it’s one of two Nirvana albums that has ever been my favorite Nirvana album⁷. It’s also the last thing they recorded as a band for, like, release. 

⁷ the other, of course, is In Utero, and that’ll come later

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: MTV’s Unplugged was an interesting idea that only rarely bore fruit. There are other great Unplugged records⁸, but this is sort of the one against which they are all judged. It was recorded five months before Kurt Cobain’s death (and aired six months after it, less than a year after it was recorded), in the midst of one of Cobain’s periodic fits of withdrawal. It’s also an example of the value of doing what works for you as a band, rather than what works for anyone else – one of the biggest bands in the world came on, played a set that was about half covers (the least obscure of which, “The Man Who Sold the World,” wasn’t even particularly well known among David Bowie fans), including three covers by their special guests, the Kirkwood brothers from the Meat Puppets, a band that had yet to have so much as a whiff of radio attention (although they would, of course, probably as a direct result). The originals consisted of maybe three songs that could legitimately have been thought of as “hits,” and none were their biggest hits. It’s a weird choice, and it worked. 

⁸ Jay-Z’s is nearly as good as this one, Lauryn Hill’s is great, I could probably come up with a couple more if I needed to

BUT IS IT GREAT: Oh yes. Very much so. 

Led Zeppelin – Houses of the Holy
WHAT IT IS: The results of what happens when Led Zeppelin gets bored of being Led Zeppelin and starts trying to be other bands. 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: I mean, if you put Rolling Stone’s name on the thing, you’ve got to expect a minimum of four LZ albums here⁹. This is the first one I’d kick off of the ones you’d consider classically eligible¹⁰, but I’m not a voter. 

⁹ in fact there are five

¹⁰ that is to say, not Coda, Presence, In Through the Out Door or The Song Remains the Same, and leaving out How the West Was Won – which is actually great – or their BBC Sessions, which are also very good

BUT IS IT GREAT: It is, actually, just not as great as anything they did before it. Even III. 

Alicia Keys – The Diary of Alicia Keys
WHAT IT IS: Alicia Keys’s second album, and the one that has a song produced by Kanye on it. It’s a good song! Man, remember how good Kanye used to be? 

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: Alicia Keys is a very visible and prominent member of the popular music establishment, while also managing to be at least a little bit interesting as an artist and performer, so it stands to reason she wouldn’t have a hard time garnering enough votes to come in here in the back half of the list. Plus, she sold a bazillion copies of this thing. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It’s not my cup of tea

Radiohead – The Bends
WHAT IT IS: Radiohead’s second album overall, but their first great album

WHAT BRINGS IT HERE: I am even less able to be objective about The Bends than I was about Third/Sister Lovers or Nirvana’s Unplugged. This is here because Radiohead were a moderately-successful band that decided to stop doing most of what made them famous and concentrate on doing what would make them great¹¹. Half the album turned out to be singles¹², all of the songs are great, and the real question is not “why is this here” but rather “why is the one with ‘Street Spirit’ and ‘Fake Plastic Trees’ this low?”.

¹¹ although it’s their next record, OK Computer, that really put them in the stratosphere of all-time greats

¹² actually, the lead-off single is the double A-Side “Planet Telex b/w Fake Plastic Trees” single, which means that seven of the album’s twelve songs were released on singles, if not as singles. 

BUT IS IT GREAT: It sure is. 

Shamelessly Punting: A list of 25 Things that Turn 30 in 2021

As always, ranked in absolute, inarguable order of quality

The Jesus Lizard – Goat

Jeff Smith – Bone

Slint – Spiderland

Terry Pratchett – Reaper Man

My Bloody Valentine – Loveless

The Adventures of Pete and Pete

James Brown – Star Time

Jonathan Lethem, “The Happy Man”

Teenage Fanclub – Bandwagonesque

The Rocketeer

Fugazi – Steady Diet of Nothing

Terminator 2: Judgment Day

Doug

Defending Your Life

Jim Woodring – Frank (technically,this is the introduction of the character in the pages of JIM)

REM – Out of Time

Night on Earth

Neil Young – Weld

Nirvana – Nevermind

Del the Funkee Homo Sapien – I Wish My Brother George Was Here

Point Break

Cypress Hill – Cypress Hill

Primal Scream – Screamadelica

Thelma and Louise

Peter Bagge – Hate

The Best Records of July 2021

Vince Staples – Vince Staples (A new Vince Staples record has, heretofore, always been a reason for considerable celebration, and this one, which manages to be interior-focused without benign excessively navel-gazing, is an especially impressive accomplishment)

Alice Coltrane – Kirtan: Turiya Sings (the story behind Turiya Sings – in any form – is quite a thing, and I recommend looking it up, but suffice it to say that these recordings of just Alice Coltrane and her organ are incredible)

Midwife – Luminol (“Life metal”, she calls it, and who am I to argue?)

Aaron Dilloway & Lucrecia Dalt – Lucy & Aaron (It will always be surprising to me how well these two work together, now even on record!)

Zelooperz – Van Gogh’s Left Ear (Bruiser Brigade in general is on a real tear, and this might be the best record of the bunch)