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Thundercat recommended Nightfly by Donald Fagen in Music (curated)

 
Nightfly by Donald Fagen
Nightfly by Donald Fagen
1982 | Rock
(0 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Donald Fagen's solo album is another of those albums that kind of teaches you what it is to be a songwriter. I feel like Donald Fagen did Aja for the musicians, and The Nightfly is for the songwriter. It's very much a concentrated idea. I remember getting turned on to this album by my home girl at the time; she was very much a muso. I would spend a lot of time listening to Steely Dan, and I didn't connect the dots – sometimes you don't connect them on your own. I had to be somewhere between 18 and 22 – somewhere in those years – she played me that album and I remember again, whenever I heard somebody create progressional music that are not normal choices, it always would perk my ears up, if it was somebody that would tastefully do something different or make some really outlandish choices, and Donald Fagen is the king of that. The Nightfly is one of those albums that I can't live without, that is where I come from as a songwriter. That again definitively is what created the songwriter in me, as compared to the bass player. The choice of the covers, the jazz covers, they feel like they were his songs, the way that he's playing them on the album – he made them real special. It was like it told his actual story of who he was, and I feel like that's the way you're supposed to play standards, not the part where you just learn it because it's cool. I think that there's some emotional connection that Donald Fagen had to these songs that he chose, along with the ones that he wrote on this album, and you can feel it. You can feel it. You can feel it. The Nightfly is a definitive album for me."

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Frank Carter recommended Boy in da Corner by Dizzee Rascal in Music (curated)

 
Boy in da Corner by Dizzee Rascal
Boy in da Corner by Dizzee Rascal
2003 | Hip-hop
6.4 (5 Ratings)
Album Favorite

"Lyrically Dizzee Rascal is phenomenal, and musically he's one of the most progressive, forward thinking grime artists and musicians of our time. He won the Mercury Prize over ten years [before Skepta], which says it all. This record was what I listened to when I was commuting to and from Slough, when I was just starting Gallows, I was listening to it nonstop. I've loved grime since I was young, I've always loved hip hop but grime was so quintessentially British, you couldn't have made it anywhere else. To me grime is punk, more now than ever. Punk to me was the sound of disenfranchised youth, and that's what grime is. You take everything away from young people and tell them what they can't do, at some point they're going to say 'yes we can', and that's what's happening now. They feel discriminated against and now they're making the right fucking decisions by showing that. I think it's a classic record. What's really nice to see is that back when this arrived on the scene it was still very much about beef in the grime scene, people were still writing diss tracks, whereas what's happened recently is that when he played those tenth anniversary shows you just see everybody celebrating it, celebrating the fact that here's an album that did so much over a decade ago, and now we've just had a second [grime Mercury Prize winner]. I love that, but my problem is that there haven't been more. I love that these are being used as bookmarkers, as milestones, but we need a lot more than that, more progressive, forward thinking, unique individuals. That's what the Mercury Prize is supposed to be for, though it misses more than it hits."

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