Apple Core: Lady Gaga, AC/DC, Tyler the Creator, George Michael

Our journey through Apple Music's Top 100 Albums of All Time continues.

Apple Core

Liz and I are listening to Apple Music’s Top 100 Albums of All Time. One album a day-ish, counting down to number one. We did this with Rolling Stone Magazine’s top 500 Albums of Al Time, and it took more than a year. This should only take a hundred days or so. I’ll be posting a few thoughts here as I listen. We’ll be dropping standout tracks from the listen on this Spotify playlist here. Here’s parts one and two.

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Day 92: Tyler, the Creator — Flower Boy

The album title was the first sign that something had changed. The album art was another clue. Tyler Okonma, the undeniably gifted but unapologetically transgressive enfant terrible of the underground hip-hop scene, was turning over a new leaf. Tyler the Creator had built a career off music that was as artistically gripping as it was lyrically galling. With Flower Boy he proved introspection can be as good for the creative process as it is for the soul.

And not a moment too soon. Tyler had really run his schtick into the ground with Odd Future. Like other creative geniuses who’d gotten called out for ugly lyrics, Tyler had painted his critics as uptight moralists who just didn’t get it. That line of thinking has been wearing thin for decades but in 2016, with President Grab ‘em by the Pussy himself in the White House, all Tyler’s excuses for cheeky homophobia and winky misogyny blew up in his face.

On Flower Boy, the bratty troll turns inward, deploying his considerable artistic prowess towards mining his own loneliness and heartsickness. The music matches this new mood, weaving jazz and neo-soul into a thrilling cocktail of creative invention.

I don’t know that I’d call Flower Boy apologetic, per se, but it is a portrait of an artist as a person in crisis, desperate to be understood. Tyler raps about feelings of purposelessness and isolation, and also expresses gratitude for people who’ve stuck by him when he didn’t deserve it. “Garden Shed” scans as a song about falling in love with another man, and although Tyler is notoriously private about his personal life, he’s never disputed speculation about his bisexuality.

None of this means anyone who is understandably appalled by some of Tyler’s older lyrics is obligated to forget, forgive and unreservedly celebrate Flower Boy. But the album does deepen our understanding of Tyler’s unique genius. It not only set his career on a course that it hasn’t really deviated from since — it charted a whole new era for hip-hop in general.

Day 91: George Michael — Listen Without Prejudice, Vol 1

George Michael's transition to solo artist was going beautifully. Wham!'s breezy, carefree swing evolved into Michael's sugary club bounce with ease, and 'Faith' became one of the best selling albums of all time. George Michael was a bonafide pop sensation. And he was miserable.

The reasons behind Michael's gloom are the subject of any number of documentaries, podcasts, Wikipedia deep dives, historical record and good old fashioned rumors. He did not publicly come out until 1998, but had been confiding in close friends and family members since he was a teenager. (He later said his sister advised him to stay in the closest, for their mother's sake). So Michael watched a generation of gay people swallowed by plague, even as the material excess of the 80s started to fester throughout the country. That will do something to a guy. It drove Michael to 'Listen Without Prejudice, Vol 1.'

'LWP, V1' was a big departure for Michael. The club staples and party tracks that had made him a sensation were replaced by acoustic, bossa nova-steeped ballads and jammy, homespun anthems of social concern and personal despair. The first single was "Praying for Time," in which Michael declared that "God's stopped keeping score / I guess somewhere along the way he let us all out to play / Turned His back on all God's children, crept out the back door." It came and left the Billboard charts with little fanfare.

The album did eventually churn out a minor hit in the anti-MTV screed "Freedom!" (which, ironically, did very well on MTV) but 'LWP, Vol 1' was regarded as a disappointment from fans who'd been hoping for more bops. There were rumors that the album's "Vol 1" was a tease for a follow-up of pop bangers, but nothing materialized until a posthumous four-disc reissue which does indeed have a lot of unreleased dance music.

Time has been kind to this album though. Stripped of the context of social expectation, it's easy to see that Michael was frustrated by the limitations of the dance scene. He was an ambitious artist, deeply concerned by the state of the world and taking inspiration from guys like John Lennon and Stevie Wonder (the latter of whom he covers here). 'LWP, Vol 1' has the same rigorous production standards that made 'Faith' and 'Last Christmas' so undeniable, but applied towards a warmer, more lived in feel. Even when Michael is aching with despair, like on the heartbreaking anti-war anthem "Mother's Pride," the music itself glows with beauty. On 'Waiting for That Day,' Michael lightly extrapolates 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' to make fun of a guy who thinks he's going to make it through the decade alive. The guy in question, it's clear, is Michael himself.

Michael did survive the decade, but his career did not survive 'LWP, Vol 1,' and his pop star momentum got sidetracked by a messy legal fight with his label. His legacy suffered. He was outed in 1998 by a police sting operation and, more existentially, committed the crime of being a deeply earnest artist in an era where irony was the pop culture currency of choice.

But a simmering cultural reappraisal is underway, and this album's inclusion on this list is only the most recent example. Younger generations, have been better educated about the wave of death that decimated the early 90s even as our political leaders dismissed it as a "gay cancer." In the face of such horrors, Michael's response is not only rational but affecting and illuminating.

Day 90: AC/DC — Back in Black

“I took a look inside your bedroom door / You looked so good lying on your bed / Well, I asked if you wanted any rhythm and love / You said you wanna rock and roll instead.”

This, from “Rock and Roll Ain’t Noise Pollution,” is as pure a distillation of AC/DC’s ethos as you could ask for. It’s got sex. It’s got, presumably, drugs, just offstage. And above all, it’s got rock and roll, the chief end of man, the highest priority of any sane woman, of any sane PERSON. Other bands saw rock as a tool (“this machine kills fascists”) or an exercise (“I wanna rock and roll all night and party everyday.”) For AC/DC, rock is a force, a universal law like gravity or time, and they are its most devoted disciples, spreading the awesome news through a dementedly righteous ministry of hot girls, good times and monster riffs.

I popped this one on at the gym (one of Back in Black’s natural habitats) not even really sure if it was worth it. Like you, I’ve heard these songs hundreds of times, and know several of them by heart. Would another listen really unveil anything new? Is it even worth listening to Back in Black again? As it turns out, the answer to those questions is respectively: no and hell yes. When you pop on Back in Black, you are baptizing yourself in 42 minutes of nitro-grade adrenaline that no amount of movie trailers, car ads and Monday Night Football commercial breaks can diminish.

It’s one of the great ironies of rock that such a powerful ode to having a good time began in tragedy. In the wake of Highway to Hell’s global success, lead vocalist Bon Scott passed away alone in his car after a night of hard drinking. The cops called it “death by misadventure.” The distraught band considered breaking up until Scott’s father pulled them aside at the funeral and convinced them to go on in his late son’s memory. Charged thus, the band found a new lead singer in Brian Johnson and got back to rocking.

The transition couldn’t have been more seamless. For all their bad boy cred, Angus and Malcolm Young have always been functionally harmless and Johnson was welcomed into the band as if he’d been there all along. They invited him to write whatever he wanted, and he wrote “You Shook Me All Night Long” (he would later swear that he literally felt Scott’s spirit assist him from beyond the grave.) Johnson’s voice isn’t a dead ringer for Scott’s, but it’s close enough that we can assume a decent number of fans were none the wiser. Back in Black came out about a year to date after Highway to Hell, five months after Scott's death. From the brink of oblivion, AC/DC had never been more back.

That’s a pretty mythic origin story for such a fun album, but Scott wouldn’t have had it any other way. He would have loved Back in Black. How do I know? Because everyone does. You turn on “Shoot to Thrill” or “Hells Bells” in basically any place in the world, and you’re in for a good time. The title track makes a feast out of its riff, THAT riff, THE riff, the riff by which all others must be measured. And only within the context of these lads being incorrigible party animals could a song like “You Shook Me All Night Long” come across as romantic, almost sweet.

Is Back in Black AC/DC’s best album? It’s hard to say, since AC/DC’s oeuvre kinda feels like one long album. They are a case study in not fixing what ain’t broke. But it’s their biggest, the one that cemented their legacy. “I asked if you wanted rhythm and love, you said you wanted to rock and roll instead.” When the rock and roll is this good, who could fault her?

Day 89: Lady Gaga — The Fame Monster

In 2009, I’d been seeing a girl for a few weeks and she’d decided it was time to introduce me to her friends. She told me to come out and meet them. “We’re going to an album release party,” she said. “For that girl, Lady Gaga.”

“Lady who?”

“She’s, like,” she waved her hands around, looking for a word. “A Person.”

I was not familiar with the club scenes and QDPs where Gaga had been establishing herself as A Person but, that night, even I could tell “Bad Romance” was something special. Pop was in a weird place in 2009. The biggest stars — Kanye, Eminem, Amy Winehouse — weren’t playing “pop” in the way we think of it. The people making more conventional pop — the XX, Passion Pit, Santogold — weren’t big stars. The closest thing we had to an up-and-coming pop star was Katy Perry.

Lady Gaga’s first foray into the charts was a trio of singles from her debut: “LoveGame,” “Just Dance” and “Poker Face.” The first two aren’t anything special. Even if you like “Just Dance,” it’s nothing Rihanna or Kelly Clarkson couldn’t have done. “Poker Face” was the hit, and the only single that hinted at the energy that Gaga would utilize to put the coming decade in a chokehold. It’s an earworm, obviously, but a spiky, twisty one that draws you in even as it just slightly repulses you. It’s a pretty good microcosm of the sound Gaga would explore more fully on Fame Monster and eventually take on as a whole entire personality.

Gaga came up through the NYU arts scene, part pop princess, part theater weirdo. Over time, she’d learn how to wield these two identities in unison to incredible results. She’d achieved just the slightest modicum of fame when she started giving heady interviews about celebrity, waxing philosophical about the legacies of Andy Warhol and David Bowie. Gaga was fascinated by the subject of celebrity long before she entered its ranks. In an era of confessional fame — where artists like Winehose, Eminem and Kanye used the most intimate details of their lives as raw material for their art — Gaga was more interested in celebrity as artifice. Think about it. It’s a safe bet you know the name of Eminem’s daughter, Kanye’s politics and Winehouse’s whole tragic saga. What do you know about Gaga? Who has she dated? Where was she born? What’s her real name?

Lady Gaga used her nascent celebrity as its own font of creativity and started writing songs about it: “The Fame,” “Star Struck,” “Beautiful Dirty Rich,” "Paparazzi.” Those songs formed the backbone of The Fame Monster, basically a re-release of her debut with more meat on the bones. She also wrote “Bad Romance,” which catapulted her into the stratosphere she’d been writing about on the strength of an indelible hook, an iconic “Whoa-oh-oh-Ooooh-oh-OH-oh-ohhh” and, of course, the music video.

Music videos are important to Gaga’s whole thing. It’s where she flexed her strongest, strangest muscles, going nuts with gonzo fits and preposterous visuals. For Gaga, fashion is armor, fame is performance art, and she enjoyed experimenting with ways to present her body to the public that subverted, overturned and superseded expectations. Remember the meat dress? The time she hatched from an egg? Everybody was talking about the stunts she pulled but, crucially, nobody was talking about her. We all might have been talking about a Madam Tussauds wax figure for as close as we ever got to the real person. Celebrity is inherently fake. Gaga made that fakeness a feature instead of a bug.

Songs like “Bad Romance,” Alejandro” and “Paparazzi” joined “Poker Face” in signaling that a new pop star was in town, and she was playing by her own very odd rules. The Beyonce collab “Telephone” isn’t quite as sticky, but it’s got a sick music video. “Paparazzi” is still my favorite Gaga song, a just slightly creepy banger that put early ‘10s gossip rags on their heels before many of them even knew who she was.

Honestly, there’s a lot of stuff on the rest of the album that I’d write off as fluff. Though Gaga has never come out and said it, there’s speculation that Fame Monster’s limpest tracks (“Boys Boys Boys,” “Money Honey,” “Dance in the Dark”) were the result of interference from studio execs concerned that songs like “Bad Romance” and “Paparazzi” were too weird. But for Gaga to achieve her full potential, she had to get studios off her back, let her own freak flag fly and then disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving nothing for the rest of us to talk about except the Fame Monster. And in that sense, the girl I was seeing back in 2009 was wrong. Lady Gaga is not A Person. Not really. Lady Gaga is an idea constructed by a very talented artist named Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta that we’ve all agreed to pretend is real. She wouldn’t have it any other way.