2 comments about Urban Blues.

1. I could kick myself in the duff for not picking this cd up when I had the chance years ago @ a Border's store for only $5.99. Now I can't find the damn thing anywhere. On top of that it sells for $18.99 new on Amazon and used for $13.99. I screwed myself hard with that misjudgement.
   
   I still don't own the album, but I have heard it all the way through. Let me just say that whoever is playing bass on this album has fingers of gold (listen to the 1st track to readily agree w/ me). This album sounds much like the great "Serves You Right To Suffer" album also recorded in the mid 1960's. Both albums feature JLH w/ a band who knows not to be overbearing, to simply lay down the beat while still letting JLH's voice and guitar playing remain on the foreground - unlike JHL's 1980's & 1990's over-produced clean sounding recordings w/ all-star bands. "Serves You Right..." is a bit more diversified while "Urban Blues" is more groove oriented. Good stuff, but find it used.



2. This was my first blues cd, and hooker hooked me! I you like blues and John Lee Hooker, this would be a great cd to add to your collection

4 comments about Get Your Ass In The Water And Swim Like Me: Narrative Poetry From Black Oral Tradition.

1. I first learned of this CD after reading a review several years ago in a San Diego alternative paper and just had to hear it myself. What a riot it is!
   Those who think that "ho" and other disrespectful terms for women are new expressions in the seamier side of African-American culture are in for a big surprise. Here in these "toasts" are the roots of rap, with all of the macho posturing and blatant misogyny and sexism that goes with it.
   If one can say, as the compilers of the CD imply, that saving these toasts for posterity is important, it is important because these toasts betray the knack of their authors for a very clever use of the language. One can disparage the crudity of the toasts, yet admire their construction. One can dislike the "music" of rap, but actually enjoy some of the raps themselves.
   Not all of these toasts are sexist. The "Signifying Monkey" tells of an animal in a position of weakness using cunning and sweet talk to turn the tables on his physically more powerful adversary. Get In Out Of The Rain is a hilarious tale of a guy who drops in on a friend to escape the rain only to find himself in a place almost as bad.
   My favorites are Pimpin' Sam and The Lame and the Whore. They are ROUGH, yet they are outrageously entertaining.
   This is surely not a CD you'll want to buy for your girlfriend, your wife, your mother or your sister. But if you enjoy clever wordplay and can stomach something that is rude, crude, lewd AND hilarious, then this unusual compilation should find a home in your CD collection.



2. This CD brought back memory of the toasts my dad used to recite. In some cases it provides insight into Black culture of a given time period. It's not for the easily offended, as the lyrics are quite explicit, but you can't beat it for the nostalgia connection.



3. This CD is the reissue of the LP that accompanied the book (an anthology of Toasts) of the same name by Bruce Jackson. It includes examples of some of the most classic Toasts...



4. the precursor to today's gangsta (sp???) rap, which is reason alone to buy it. Oh and it's gonna be worth a lot of money someday.

1 comments about Walk On.

1. I am lucky enough to live in Texas and to have seen Maren perform live. She is crazy talented and is just getting better with age. I look forward to many more albums from her.

1 comments about Motown Two.

1. Why on earth would someone want to pay almost 40 dollars for this import, when you could buy "Motown" and "Motown Two" for almost half the price as this CD set?
   
   Plus, this version leaves out "Too High" which appears on the original "Motown". I agree, sometimes the imports are worth more because they include cuts not available in the US.
   
   ...just not this time...

4 comments about Gold.

1. I strongly disagree with the other reviewers. I previously owned the Mercury Anthology 2 cd box, which has AWFUL sound quality. This has all the essentials & much improved sound & is often discounted to a really low price. Includes the entire Every Picture album (although oddly side 2 of the original album is on cd 1 & side 1 is on cd 2). For me this couldn't have been much better. Add Jeff Beck's Truth, Faces A Nod Is As Good As A Wink & Faces Best, and to me you've got a pretty complete collection of all of Stewart's worthwhile material. Even on the marketing angle as mentioned by another reviewer, this isn't trying to be a rarities set for collectors, just a really nice best of.



2. I give this collection 4-stars because these really are great songs...many of Rod Stewart's best in my opinion. The problem is that you might be well advised to buy the "Reason to Believe" set of 3 CDs (also re-mastered and contains quite a few more songs that I think are worthwhile) instead. I find Rod Stewart's old "Mercury recordings" to be my favorites by far, but I agree with the other reviewer's frustration over the question of how many ways can they package this material? I'm glad it's still available, but the bizarre record company marketing strategies make choosing a collection way too complicated.



3. What This Could Have Been: When I saw first saw that Hip-O had anthologized Rod Stewart for their "Gold" compilation series, I thought, finally, a two cd set spanning Rod's entire career, maybe including some Faces stuff, plus all the classics like "Some Guys Have All The Luck", "Maggie Mae" and "Da Ya Think I'm Sexy".
   
   What It Is: As soon as I turned over to look at the track listing, my hopes for a complete anthology were crushed. All this is another cheap way to get Rod's Mercury material. Don't get me wrong, a lot of this stuff is among his best work, but how many repackagings of his years at Mercury need to be released? Isn't the "Reason To Believe" boxed set enough? Plus, for every great track on here, there is a ton of filler to augment it.
   
   Bottom line: Stick with the "Storyteller" boxed set, which includes most of the songs on here plus all his best work up to 1990, and then download all his stuff from "Vagabond Heart" onward. This collection is unneccessary.



4. Well, if you don't have Rod's first four albums, or the two-disc _Mercury Anthology_, or Polydor's _Best of_ 1+2, or the _Reason to Belive_ box set... then you probably don't care about this material anyway. The last thing the world needs is another compilation of Rod's Mercury years. Uckh!

1 comments about Blues on a Holiday.

1. Fabulous acoustic and electric blues. The man cannot be beat. He never fails.

No comments about Chronicles.

5 comments about Graveyard Blues.

1. Well I was a little nervous at first listen. I bought this record(CD...I know... I still call them records, since that's the era I grew up in)about 10 years ago, in a guitar store while purchasing a a few things, and I was looking for something I had never heard before, particularly guitar based. I happened upon this one, and was hoping I'd get lucky and not be dissapointed for my $15 sacrifice. Well after listening to it the first time, I was almost disgusted at what I got..a display of of choppy, one-beat, baby beating a cat with a violin, primitive music...but the more I listened to it it the more it consumed me, and conjured up the true soul of where music comes from. With it's mixture of simple structured- 1 to 2(if your lucky) chords, hypnotic rhythm, and painful lyrical hollaring singing style, JLH conveys his message of blues purety, racial hardtimes of the south, and the simple survial mechanisms of humanity in this cauldron of swampy voodoo boogie, jukejoint gut-bucket blues. I was hoping for a guitar virtuoso, and instead I got a true bluesman...The only downfall is that I wish JLH would play a little slide but nontheless this is the album is downright crude and a perfect example of the gloomy nature of blues music.. . and the one that introduced me to the blues and the gem of my collection. I have not found a more raw bluesman in JLH who single handly invented his own style of music whilst choking the guitar and belting out field worker chants, stomping the floor and a little whistling ta boot... You will not be dissapointed. Get ready to get addicted.



2. Branford Marsalis didn't think he played John Coltrane very well, so the tenor saxophonist went to a source that might strike people as odd: John Lee Hooker.
   
   Marsalis, 44, had made some attempts to play Coltrane's "A Love Supreme," but says, "I realized I didn't have enough experience in the blues to play it the correct way. So I decided to study the blues. I started buying records by John Lee Hooker, Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson and people like that, and really started listening to get that sound together.
   
   "I even made a record with some of those guys -- 'I Heard You Twice the First Time' (1992) -- which has John Lee Hooker and B.B. King on it," he continues. "And it all started to come together." ---excerpt from San Francisco Chronicle article, March 6, 2005



3. This album is great. The negative reviews are misguided - referring to Wes Montgomery or Charlie Christian is pointless. If you wish to hear technical mastery coupled with great feeling and improvisation - Montgomery and Christian are perfect. If you wish to hear dark intense blues SINGING (NOTE - SINGING), propelled by a primal boogie beat bashed out by old shoes on a wooden board, and with an insistent, hypnotic, fantastically monotonous guitar (which is infinitely inferior in virtuosity to Django or Wes) then buy this CD. If you want to hear something else then buy something else. Simple as.



4. If you are looking at these reviews in order to decide if this is a cd worth buying, then the answer is a resounding YES. John Lee Hooker wasn't a guitar virtuoso, but he was a virtuoso bluesman and this cd has some of his best work. If you love the blues, then you need to own this cd (and if you don't love the blues, why are you wasting everyone's time reviewing a blues cd)



5. Some of these review remind me of when I played Thelonious Monk for my mother. She remarked, "I could play like that before I took lessons." Yeah, Ma, whatever you say...

   Those reviews tell me nothing about whether this is a decent Hooker album, which is what I want to know, so I can decide whether to buy this one, or something else from Hooker. I know he mainly plays one chord. But does he play that chord well on this album?

   I know, that makes me a "liberal idiot" who can't appreciate Django Reinhardt, and who listens to American roots music because I feel sorry for black people, and I want to do a little affirmative action. Not.

   I like Django and I like Hooker. (I like Bach, too, for that matter. Does that make me a polymorphous perverse liberal? And I can't take Pete Seeger or too many other "earnest" folksingers.) I like John Fahey, too, and that's who got me to listen to all these "primitive no-talent three-chord" blues musicians, Skip James, Bukka White, Son House, Robert Johnson...

   It reminds me of that Bob Dylan line, "Don't criticize what you can't understand." On the other hand, as Mojo Nixon once sang, "Don Henley Must Die," but then I heard that Henley sang it along with Mojo on stage once. So 10 points for Henley, zero for the Philadelphia fan.

No comments about Malene.

5 comments about Learning From Falling.

1. This is one of my favorite albums EVER!
   The music speaks for itself, so I will address the "haters".
   Lamya DOES have a 5 octave range, she just uses her vocal skill more tastefully than say...Mariah Carey, and you can hear her high notes on the background at the end of "Black Mona Lisa" remix, the beginning of "Never enough" and the bridge of "I get cravings" as she sings "I get cravings....." in her whistle register.
   Secondly, yes, the lyrics are complicated and most likely unintelligent people will not get them, so it doesn't surprise me most people don't grasp them.
   Anyways, Lamya is a fabulous artist that deserves recognition and success awarded to far less talented songwritters and singers (Alicia Keys).



2. Yo! Don't sleep! Because I did. I just heard of Lamya, bough the cd off amazon last week for a penny. A freakin' penny! This cd is very good. Woulda bought it new when it first came out.
   
   From the opening song "Empires" where she boldly proclaims - Bring me men! Men to match my mountains! - that's balls! That's awesome. Wonderful, cleverly written songs that uplift the mind as well as shake the booty.
   
   This is not some trite neo-soul. This is not Bjork-lite; this is not Kate Bush-esque. This is simply Lamya doing her thing. However I must admit that if Amel Larrieux and Dido had an unholy union Lamya would be their offspring.
   
   COME BACK LAMYA!!!



3. It's one CD that I could listen to over and over again. She has a beautiful voice. I really would like to see her put out more CDs...



4. Truly a stand out CD. Still makes regular rotation on all of my playback devices.
   
   What I really want to know is: What up with the follow-up release?
   
   Come on Lamya, get off of your 'break4love' and hit us off already!!! ;-)



5. When,I first heard this album,back in 2002B.D. I thought,"Lamya" was some kind of "freak"for singing over and over again:"Bring me men" I thought,maybe she was DESPERATE!! O.K. everybody,I'm just being(extremely)silly!!!Seriously,though,I wasn't impressed(to put it nicely)with it initially!!Back then,I was,an ultra-ignorant thug,who liked to listen to "gangsta"rap,and commercialized R&B(that consisted of men-bashing,materialism,women bragging on their physical assets etc..)whilst running rampant through the streets' of Detroit...Like,I stated earlier,in this review,that was B.D.(Before Discomfiture)read:MASSIVE stroke!!!After,I emerged(a changed man)from,a comatose state,barely alive,I began,to appreciate good music,peaceful living,and family...Around 2004,I,really started to "feel"Lamyas' music,and now,she's at the top of my list,of ingenius and "lady-like"female artist!!"East of Anywhere"and "Never Enough"are good"clean"and thoughtful songs' that most of the,listless,ladies' of this day and age,would be hard-pressed,to come up with!!!An album,without constant references,to materialism,"bling" and sex,is hard to come by,in these times!!But Lamya PROOVES,that such content,is NOT necessary,to make an EXCELLENT album!!!That,it took,me being"slowed-down"and mellowed out(by a life disconcerting calamity)to appreciate Lamyas'"classy"and intelligent contribution,to the music scene was a shame!!But,nevertheless,I REALLY enjoy her NOW,and would love the chance,to see her perform LIVE in concert one day..I love Lamyas'music so much,I wish she had a sweatshirt(and kullcap)with that,COOL "Learning From Falling album cover,logo on it,available,so I could "rep"Lamya,as I stroll through Detroit!!This album,is a modern-day CLASSIC!!