Introduction: For those of you that have stumbled across this website and are interested in reading about my trek through the universe of the Tidal streaming service, let me tell you a bit about what I did. Back in 2016 I thought it would be kind of cool to listen to artist’s catalog from start to finish and rank them from best to worst. After all, who doesn’t like a good list? I thought I might do a few of them and see what happened, hoping it would introduce me to records that were foreign to me in the arsenal of an artist I was familiar with. I also though that it would be pretty cool to get out of the “one off” mode of listening to a new record, years after the previous one, in order to get a true sense of how the artist matured over time. Flash forward to June of 2019 and 250 catalogs later, I have ended the trek. I posted these all on Facebook over the years as they were completed but I’m going to move them all over here, starting with #1, in order to expand them out a bit more. Facebook doesn’t exactly allow for great formatting, you know?
As with all my catalogs, to be considered in the ranking, an album has to meet certain criteria:
- The artist must actually perform on 80% of the tracks (soundtrack and rap provision)
- No compilations of previous released material will be included.
- The album must have been released officially and within the realm of the label that the artist would have been on at the time or official releases posthumously (normally applies to a slew of live records)
- Any EPs must contain new new music and be relevant to the catalog, not be more like a single with a b-side or two.
- Compilations of previously recorded material will be included if they are remixes, bonus tracks, outtakes… mostly music that hasn’t been part of a main release before)
Entrance Point: Just a handful of singles but I really wanted to do another funk catalog after how much fun I had with Parliament-Funkadelic.
All albums ranked on a 10 point scale.
Editor’s Note: This is another post I’m going to just archive from Facebook as I don’t feel like remixing it.
Original Facebook notes: Finished the musical catalog of Slave, on Tidal today. Damn fine catalog though they do fall into the same pattern that many of the funk bands in the 70s, that continue throughout the 80s and early 90s do – in that they seem to lose innovation once the mid-80s rolls around and continue to make album after album that sound the same. And then they simply start rerecording versions of their old hits. So many funk bands fade away in the same manner…. but Slave did a solid job of changing with the times, from hard funk, to disco, to ’80s funk and then to a cheesy late ’80s R&B/Funk mixture. And this made me go back and listen to Ready for the World – now that I compare, total influence right there.
- Slave (9.5)
- Visions of the Lite (9.5)
- Show Time (9)
- Stone Jam (8.5)
- Bad Enuff (8)
- New Plateau (8)
- The Concept (7.5)
- Hardness of the World (7)
- Just a Touch of Love (7)
- Unchained at Last (6.5)
- Make Believe (6.5)
- 88 (6)
- Rebirth (5)
- The Funk Strikes Back (4)
- Masters of the Fungk (1.5)
Summary: 15 albums, average 6.9
The Trusty Steed 