Jerk Music Critic: Run-DMC, Raising Hell

Hip-hop wasn't big until this album, really. But this album made it really big and did so almost effortlessly. Dig the variety: silly stuff like "My Adidas" and "You Be Illin'" (setting the mold for later acts like DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince), beatboxing in "Hit It Run," hard beats in "Peter Piper" and "It's Tricky" and phat rock and bass in "Raising Hell," probably the most technically well-constructed track on the disc. "Dumb Girl" might hit a little too close to home for some and "Son Of Byford" is a dopey throwaway, but "Proud To Be Black" is a literate, aggressive and proud history lesson any listener of any colour can learn from. And let's not forget their new advance in sampling, where instead of just DJing the song Aerosmith came back to actually perform on their cover of "Walk This Way" and rebooted themselves in the process. That's big. The 2005 remaster includes an "acapella" version of "My Adidas" which isn't all that special and the two radio spots (one complete with outtakes and producer) are absolutely brainless, but "Lord Of Lyrics" has a solid rock backing strong enough to make the main album and the rough cuts and glitches of the "Walk This Way" demo have a strangely affable feel that puts you right in the studio. (Content: mild expletives; S- and F-bombs in the "Live At The Apollo" spot.)

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Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

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An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

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A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

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Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

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Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

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Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

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How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.