We love music, especially the kind our dads listen to. The eight legendary albums below have reached half-centennial status, and we couldn’t resist the urge to examine whether these albums still hold up or if they were worth the acclaim in the first place. Are you ready to take a look with us?
— Amaya Choudhury and Ben Luu, Daily Arts Writer and Summer Managing Arts Editor
Blood on the Tracks – Bob Dylan
Blood on the Tracks has felt 50 years old since its release. Following Bob Dylan’s numerous musical escapades — be it Guthrie-style, electric or plain country folk — Blood finds Dylan mixing and matching all those sub-genres to form (perhaps) the best and most longing album of his career. On “Simple Twist of Fate,” the guitar is bare, a bit wobbly. The shy bass twinkling behind the naked guitar provides a bit of structure to the track, and together, they set the dim and nostalgic stage for Dylan’s pained voice. Here, Dylan relays a heartbreak he’s seemingly contained for far too long, using the simple, age-old archetypes of sailors and women by the docks: “People tell me it’s a sin / To know and feel too much within / I still believe she was my twin but I lost the ring.”
“Shelter from the Storm” and “Buckets of Rain” are similarly rustic, instrumentally sparse and emotionally heavy. The tracks recall the warmth of “One Too Many Mornings” from The Times They Are A-Changin’ but with the plain, emotional directness of tracks like “Tonight I’ll Be Staying Here with You” from Nashville Skyline. Their imagery, paired with Dylan’s stripped-back acoustics, brings an old-timey fairytale wonder to the tracks.
Some of the other memorable cuts from Blood are denser. The opening “Tangled up in Blue” features a vivid narrative about two lovers across space and time — and some of Dylan’s best one-liners. In one moment, Dylan finds himself in his bed, his lover beside. Next, he’s outside of Delacroix. At once, he’s uneasy and amorous at a strip club, and then hopelessly alive — “The only thing I knew how to do / Was to keep on keeping on, like a bird that flew.” Driving this narrative home is a sprawling guitar lick, upbeat but deeply nostalgic — the sort of rhythm that accompanies you when you flip through an unorganized family album. “Meet Me in the Morning” sees Dylan reducing his lyricism to short phrases, but the sprawling guitar takes on a busy, bluesy inflection to make up for it. And on “Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts,” Dylan relentlessly but brilliantly blabbers about a convoluted trio — as he is wont to do. The harmonica brightens the sound, while the understated organ lends formality and grandeur.
That organ on “Lily” likely represents the entire record: Blood is not Dylan’s most political, most groundbreaking, or any other superlative, but the album feels as grand and timeless as a century-old record.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
Born to Run – Bruce Springsteen
Bruce Springsteen’s Born to Run is every bit as restless as the title suggests. There are a number of reasons for this: Born to Run epitomizes heartland rock and surveys the life of the blue-collar worker; Born to Run careens through the rush of coming-of-age in Midwestern America; Born to Run was Bruce Springsteen’s last attempt to prove himself after receiving critical acclaim but little commercial success on his previous two albums. Whatever the reason, come 1975, Springsteen’s restlessness culminated in the now larger-than-life Born to Run.
But Born to Run isn’t larger-than-life in a grandiose sense. Part of the album’s charm is the intimacy Springsteen captures when navigating through slice-of-life anecdotes of the heart rush and heartbreak of young midwesterners. Born to Run feels real, and it feels American; beneath grand power chords and looming sax solos is the cherubic flush of a quintessentially American life. Regarding the now iconic opening track, “Thunder Road,” Springsteen states that the song is more than just an introduction. In an interview, he explains: “The music sounds like an invitation. Something is opening up to you.” Born to Run brims with the sun-bleached warmth of a hot American summer, fireflies, fireworks and first kisses.
This is the beating, burning heart of Born to Run: Springsteen’s storytelling. Throughout the album, Springsteen pieces together stories of love, of loss, of being free and of feeling trapped. It’s unyielding. Eventually, the album approaches a still and draws to a close, bowing out in a nearly ten-minute-long swansong, “Jungleland.”
“Jungleland” is pure magic. A boundless love story and a senseless loss, it typifies the spirit of the entire album in a sweeping saxophone solo and vivid lyricism. Everything becomes a contradiction: heightened yet real. Despite the presence of a fictionalized magical rat, “Jungleland” dramatizes a grounded story of greasers and gangs all roaming about, tethered to a very real emotional core; these are the lives of the unseen, whispered exchanges on dark streets and children growing into their place in the world. When the track does fizzle out into ruminations of anger at a senseless loss, the magic never dissipates, just hardens.
Born to Run was Springsteen’s last-ditch effort before striking out for good. Springsteen harvested and honed his nervous energy, his tireless tension, and sculpted Born to Run, batting a home run and running for the hills, wind rushing over the next great American record. 50 years later, Bruce Springsteen is still the voice of a generation for blue-collar Americans to finally feel seen.
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu.
Fleetwood Mac – Fleetwood Mac
The debut of Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham in Fleetwood Mac’s self-titled album changed the legacy of the band forever. Before their arrival, Fleetwood Mac was a haggardly blues-adjacent outfit. Tracks like “Without You” from Then Play On represent the best of their groovy, rough aesthetic; there, a lulling bass accompanies a similarly droopy voice. Fleetwood Mac wastes no time in wiping the slate clean and rebranding the band as soft rock. The eccentric Buckingham embodies the energy of a sprinter with the opening “Monday Morning.” There’s a carefree spirit in his guitar playing, with each riff radiating pure sunshine, almost in defiance of the lull in previous albums. Buckingham sounds infectiously unbothered: “But you know, it’s true / You only want me when I get over you.” Buckingham’s “Blue Letter” is likewise a riot, showcasing his boisterous attitude. But on the ending track, “I’m so Afraid,” Buckingham’s guitar takes on a fuzzy, dramatic inflection while Mick Fleetwood’s drums, heavy as loneliness, have the doom and gloom appropriate for the end of the world.
Nicks is stupendous. Leading the vocals only on two songs — compared to Buckingham’s four — she dims Buckingham’s sunshine with the melancholy of youth, sauntering through a forest in the haunting “Rhiannon.” The drums are dark with some sparse piano keys sparkling behind them, adding a false sense of hope to lyrics like “She rules her life like a fine skylark / And when the sky is starless.” John McVie’s gliding bass makes for a woodlandy delight. “Landslide” evokes the same melancholy, but instead of being in the forest like “Rhiannon,” Nicks seems to have found a perch on a rock, looking down at the path she’s taken. Her voice is reflective, soft and a bit naive — the perfect combination to make your heart crack but not break.
Yet, as impressive as Buckingham and Nicks are, the debutants have nothing on Christine McVie, who had been in the band for four years at this point. On “Warm Ways,” McVie’s writing is as bright as Buckingham’s guitar, and her soulful contralto longs and loves. “I, I am waiting for the sun to come up / I can’t sleep, with your warm ways.” On the other tracks she leads — “World Turning” and “Sugar Daddy” — her jovial piano bounces with the joy that only true, requited romance brings. There’s a strange sense of maturity in McVie’s voice, even at her most lovesick, that helps balance out the ruckus of youth from the debutants.
With these three leading, Fleetwood on drums and John McVie on bass, Fleetwood Mac is something of a cohesive, best hits record … except the debut of Buckingham and Nicks gave the band an uplifting facelift. That duo, in collaboration with the existing members of Fleetwood Mac, would soon change rock history forever, and this self-titled album is both a wonderful project and teaser for the magic to come.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
Young Americans – David Bowie
Born out of a desire to chase the sound of soul, David Bowie’s Young Americans is a British man’s pastiche of America — particularly Black America. Bowie was aware of the inauthenticity behind his self-described “plastic soul”: a white man’s attempt at harnessing sounds rooted in black pain. Both the term and the musical movement it described would soon catch like wildfire, with a wave of white rockers returning home to the sound that birthed the genre in the first place. Most notably was Paul McCartney’s admission that 1965’s Rubber Soul was a blue-eyed take on Black music, but the incorporation of soulful and funk elements was prominent in other white musicians of the time; Mick Jagger and the Rolling Stones were another chief example.
Bowie ushered in this homecoming by collaborating with none other than the pinnacle of British rock royalty himself, John Lennon. His first appearance on the album is on Bowie’s soulful rendition of the Beatles’ “Across the Universe.” Lennon contributes a small guitar part to the cover. Though sonically lush, the track exemplifies the plastic of plastic soul: shiny, smooth and a little empty. Lennon’s second appearance on the album is admittedly much more successful; Young American’s star-studded closer, “Fame.” An aptly titled, funk-rock rumination on stardom, “Fame” would ironically be Bowie’s first No. 1 hit, shooting to the top of the charts in September of 1975. Sleazy and textured, “Fame” also pokes at the plastic of reality, this time at the hollow nature of fame in all its artificial glory. The track moves and grooves, winds and weaves — a living, breathing entity that would eventually become synonymous with Bowie’s excellence and a hallmark of the rock genre as a whole.
This excellence is found all over the remainder of the album, Bowie upholding the pillars of rock through a funky bassline, one track at a time. Skating between the spider-like gossamer of “Win” and the full-bodied lush of “Somebody up There Likes Me,” Bowie is brilliantly cohesive yet fresh throughout the entirety of Young Americans. Today, the album is unshakable. In its time, it was novel in the way that only Bowie standing on the shoulders of brilliant Black artistry could have been. Young Americans is a love letter to soul and it is rock music’s homecoming. Upon reflection, it is difficult to laud Bowie for his beautiful homage to Black music without also acknowledging that the album is in fact an homage. Bowie never loses sight of what he’s coming home to. 50 years later, neither should we.
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu
Still Crazy After All These Years – Paul Simon
Paul Simon’s fourth solo album, following his departure from Simon & Garfunkel, feels perpetually premature. The title track, “Still Crazy After All These Years,” is initially ripe with cute irony. “And we talked about some old times / And we drank ourselves some beers / Still crazy after all these years.” Keyboardist Barry Beckett lends the track a childish, naive sort of twinkle as Simon contrasts mundanity with craze. It’s a pleasant — if a bit ho-hum — affair until the strings creep in, granting the track some much needed variation. But then suddenly, Simon bursts out with some awkward high notes following the second verse: “Four in the morning / Crapped out, yawning.” And then, an extravagant sax solo follows, paralleling Simon’s burst but lacking any sense of cohesion. The track feels performatively grand.
Much of the same can be said of the next track, “My Little Town,” which sees Simon & Garfunkel reuniting. The song starts off promising enough: The duo’s harmonies, after all these years, are still heavenly. Then, the track explodes, as the horns take center stage and Simon and Garfunkel repeat, “Nothing but the dead and dyin’ / Back in my little town.” Unfortunately, the duo is merely gesturing at grandiosity here, as the track feels much too short. Being a breezy three-minute affair means that Simon and Garfunkel’s sudden reflections on death feel purely theatrical rather than earned.
No. 1 hit “50 Ways to Leave Your Lover” is disastrous. With wince worthy lyrics like “Slip out the back, Jack / Make a new plan, Stan” and “Hop on the bus, Gus / You don’t have to discuss much,” there isn’t much redeeming besides the haunting title and Simon’s delivery of it. Worse, the supposedly groovy drum beat and corny vocals backing its chorus accentuate Simon’s directionless writing. He sounds like a self-help author, testing out post-divorce catchphrases for his next book. “Gone At Last” attempts to mix gospel and piano rock, and it fails at both. Simon genuinely attempts to produce a sound that David Bowie would caricature that very same year with Young Americans. Still Crazy After All These Years slips further into awkward blandness with “Have a Good Time.” But there’s at least more personality in the song’s funky horn arrangements and Simon’s nonchalant delivery of the chorus than the last two drab cuts, “You’re Kind” and “Silent Eyes.” Perhaps, what’s crazy after all these years is how this album was ever highly regarded at all. Nearly every cut attempts to summit, but Simon tumbles further down the emotional mountain the more he tries.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
Horses – Patti Smith
Before Riot Grrrl giants Bikini Kill and Sleater-Kinney hit the punk scene, shredding with a purpose, there was Patti Smith. She rollicked in Lou Reed’s drawl, fiery and drenched in an unmatched jubilance and sense of urgency. The title of “the grandmother of punk” rests heavy on her shoulders — and nowhere is she more capable than on 1975’s Horses.
Horses rolls like the hills, sweeps like the wind, crashes like the tides — Smith is a force of nature. It’s no wonder her oeuvre would become the blueprint for punk. Penultimate “Land: Horses / Land of a Thousand Dances / La Mer(de)” exemplifies this core groundbreaking nature to a tee. The singular track actually contains three separate movements; Colloquially (and spiritually), the track is the album’s title track — officially shortened to “Land,” but often referred to as “Horses.” Throughout the epic’s nine minute runtime, Smith doesn’t stop moving, rushing onwards like a stampede of, well, horses. Even the roiling percussive and pianistic underpinnings mimic a horse’s gallop as the track devolves into a frenzy. Under her velvety fog of poetic lyricism, Smith regales the story of an attack on a boy named Johnny and his subsequent surreal, absurdist journey.
Horses is a scholarly work. It’s apparent in the penultimate track, and it’s apparent in the gloriously noisy “Birdland.” Inspired by Peter Reich’s “Book of Dreams,” Smith retells an anecdote in which Reich’s father passes. Things take a surreal turn in the midst of a family gathering, when he believes he sees his late father captaining a spaceship in the distance. When the light fizzles out and disappears, Reich sobs beneath the stars, devastated. On “Birdland,” Smith does quiet just as well as she does loud. She oscillates between the quiet intensity of an observer, transfixed by a mysterious light, and the potent magnitude of a grieving son, mourning beneath the blanket of night.
50 years later, Horses’ influence is inescapable. Smith ushered in a new era of music: poetic, lyrical, driving and arresting. Patterned throughout the throes of contemporary rock lie Horses’ glorious bones. Go ahead. Listen for them. I dare you.
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu.
Metal Machine Music – Lou Reed
A noise record, and plainly that, Metal Machine Music is a tough listen. Little distinguishes one track from another, unless my inability to concentrate (or frankly, hear) counts as a genuine critique of the record. It drones on and on, with static scratches and shrieks resonating across a hellish hour-long soundscape. At times, like the ending of “Metal Machine Music, Pt. 4,” the album accomplishes a noddable, approvable rhythm — even if that rhythm simply repeats four beeping noises for three minutes. But Reed doesn’t do much to curry favor, designing the album to alienate. While this article supposedly celebrates albums reaching their 50s, I think Lou Reed would much prefer a middle finger.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at benllv@umich.edu.
Wish You Were Here – Pink Floyd
To love is to lose, and the quintessential depiction of loss takes sonic shape in Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here. With a 44-minute runtime, Wish You Were Here is a five-act orchestral machination that unfolds theatrically, soaring over critiques of fame, the music industry and grief.
While thematically diverse, the beating heart of Wish You Were Here is guided by a profound sense of absence, a gaping hole in the entity that is Pink Floyd. Indeed, the patchwork of Wish You Were Here is seemingly held together by this driving ache, threaded throughout each track and haunting like a ghost. The album is bookended by twin “Shine On You Crazy Diamonds,” segmented into twinkling halves, lamenting the enigmatic Syd Barrett. A founding member of Pink Floyd and childhood friend of bassist Roger Waters — as well as his own replacement, David Gilmour — Barrett departed the band a mere three years after its inception.
Though physically absent from the ensemble, Barrett’s influence would continue to ripple amongst the remaining members, culminating in the sprawling, tragic opener and outro of Wish You Were Here. Here, Barrett is not frozen in time as the deteriorating recluse who severed ties with Pink Floyd in 1968, but rather a creative spirit, a visionary, Pink Floyd’s very own crazy diamond.
The titular track, while not explicitly centering on Barrett like “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” does, holds echoes of him too. Lyrically and sonically, the track explores distance. When the track opens, this distance crackles in the form of radio static, sound waves traversing and rushing through clean air, underpinned by a far-away riff. Lyrically, the opening verse exemplifies distance as well: “So, so you think you can tell / Heaven from Hell / blue skies from pain / Can you tell a green field / from a cold steel rail? / A smile from a veil? / Do you think you can tell?” Juxtaposition is distance, multitudes of contrast separating two disparate halves. And certainly this too ties back to Barrett: the forked pathway between him and the remainder of Pink Floyd has grown too wide — it’s a desperate plea for Barrett to turn back.
When Pink Floyd took to song to ask Barrett to come home, they discovered that to love is to lose. Perhaps the greatest loss, then, is one that sinks its teeth in and never lets go.
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury can be reached at amayach@umich.edu.
50 years later, it’s clear that the dusty vinyl sleeves and the records they house haven’t become obsolete. For better or worse, each of these albums have survived the winding passage of time. Today, they are relics of a different era. While some of the albums may have held up better than others, their influence still lingers, whether that is in little ripples or sweeping waves.
Daily Arts Writer Amaya Choudhury and Summer Managing Arts Editor Ben Luu can be reached at amayach@umich.edu and benllv@umich.edu, respectively.
