The thing no one (including me) has thought hard about yet is how much the relative success of artists who aren't Western bohemians is because of fractional cent streaming payouts

The Best of Sam Cooke (1962)

This predates his GOAT song contender, which wouldn't fit anyway—instead, this is a showcase of the most convincing simulator of Cokes-in-the-icebox teen purity ever, with only a hint of grit on "Bring It on Home to Me" and a hint of darkness of "Chain Gang". Huh, aah.

Otis Redding: The Dock of the Bay (1968)

His singing was still improving in his final year, in terms of both pop-curious versatility and of making his baseline all-guns-ballading approach credible as well as committed. Certainly I don't think he would've been as funny a foil to Carla back in 1965.

Otis Redding: Otis Blue (1965)

This doesn't quite deserve its status as *the* studio soul album of the '60s, but there are worse choices (c.f. the '70s.) If many of the songs were sung better by others, only "Wonderful World" feels wrong, and somehow even "Loving You Too Long" is underrated now.

The Temptations: Greatest Hits (1966)

It's Ruffin's album: he takes two minor songs with "My Baby" in the title and gives them two different moods, between which you can interpolate all romantic experience. Kendricks gets two "Girl" songs; to his credit he never seemed sore he didn't get *that* one

(weird coincidence is that all three NZ-connected songs that seems to be doing well feature a part-Asian singer whom almost nobody thinks of as such)

The Temptations Sing Smokey (1965)

"My Girl" (+ "It's Growing") sure, but this is the best place to hear Eddie Kendricks—as the icing on an impeccably structured cake. The high Kendricks-Ruffin harmonies on "You've Really Got a Hold on Me" ("tighter!") make for the second-best version of that song.

Rebecca Boyle, Our Moon. Solid pop science b/w pop history of science that only gets a little "well that's not quite right" when the author moves on to a topic you know something about (in my case: Copernicus; Shakespeare.) If you suspect that'll bother you, the gist of the sciencey part is below.

Next list is rock/pop, last will be international (which is not close to done)

Since I register words before pictures, for a second I thought "they" was Ashlee + Diana, which might've required me to seriously reconsider my Artists of the 21st Century ranking

As often, the skip button renders a near-great album great

Sly & the Family Stone: Stand! (1969)

"Don't Call Me N—" is necessary for "Everyday People" not to be fluff, future girl group hit "Somebody's Watching You" makes the paranoia go down easy, "Sex Machine", well, it probably inspired a much greater funk touchstone. Everything else is a greatest hit.

New album dropping in a week (with lots of Funky QLA assistance), keep yr year-end lists open

The "some members of Grupo Frontera and/or their abuelas voted for Trump, maybe" controversy might've been the most statistically unavoidable scandal in pop history
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grupo_F...

(no I don't know how to do this, if I had good ideas I would've put in an application to work for Sh*r already)

2. Non-ideologues almost by definition have unstable priorities (thought experiment: how many of the "affordability" group would've been identified as such in 2019?) and may be (predictably?) reactive. I suspect the data arms race will be in guessing where they'll go, not describing where they are.

1. It's not clear that asking people to briefly describe their dream party gives a better description of their preferences than filling in a zillion Likerts—not least b/c non-ideologues aren't always great at describing what they want. There's no magic 8-ball; methodological diversity is good tho!

see "Diana Ross has been Ashlee Simpson's mother-in-law since 2014" is the kind of thing I would've known had I been hanging out with the right crowd eleven years ago
www.pinterest.com/pin/65105168...