Two Miles High Music

No Description AvailableNo Track Information AvailableMedia Type: CDArtist: RUN DMCTitle: GREATEST HITSStreet Release Date: 09/10/2002

Is Run-DMC the most important group of the past 25 years? Well, if you believe that the rise of hip-hop is the most significant musical development in a quarter century, what other conclusion can you draw? Though they may not have been responsible for the birth of rap, the Hollis, Queens, trio represents the genre's coming of age. They were the ones who brought what was largely a regional street phenomenon to the masses. The rhymes, the beats, the style, the attitude--Run-DMC introduced it all to the world. Focusing mostly on the group's first three albums--each of them a cornerstone of rap music--this 18-track collection is a reminder of a time when rap enjoyed a kind of childlike innocence: their boasts are forceful but not angry; the beats are simple but exciting; the overall effect (fueled by heavy-metal riffs) is edgy and aggressive, but not violent or destructive. But most of all, it's fun. In the 1990s, rap artists would take Run-DMC's ideas to wide extremes, but the roots of this next generation--gangsta rap's street realism, political rap's social agendas, rock-rap's antagonism--are found right here. Run-DMC--like almost all pioneers from Elvis to Louis Armstrong--suffered a period of irrelevancy when they were looked upon as quaint or outdated, but, their time will come. Rest assured, this is not '80s retro kitsch. --Marc Greilsamer

NTSC/Region 0. 2010 double DVD pressing. Filmed throughout the band's 2009 rehearsals and acclaimed summer tour, No Distance Left To Run finds all four members of Blur together for the first time in nine years. With previously unseen archive material alongside new interviews and reportage, the film recounts the highs and lows of a very British band from the late '80s to their headline return at Glastonbury and Hyde Park. The result is a musing on Englishness and identity and a portrait of friendship and resolution. The second DVD features their live perfomance at Hyde Park in the summer of 2009. EMI.

Few albums are as fueled by hope, possibility, and the lure of the open road as Born to Run, a virtual concept album about small-town Jerseyites in search of a better life via hot-rodding out on the turnpike, scoring some small-time hustle, or blowing out of town altogether, either across the river to New York City or west for parts unknown. Songs like "Jungleland," "Thunder Road," "Backstreets," and the title track are epic productions, both sonically and lyrically, borrowing from Phil Spector, Bob Dylan, Elvis Presley, and West Side Story. When Born to Run was released in 1975, it earned then-unknown Springsteen the rare honor of simultaneous covers on both Time and Newsweek. The attention was warranted then, and it still is now. --Daniel Durchholz

Neil Young's songs from this ill-fated collaboration are widely regarded as toss-offs, but the disc does contain three or four swell Young tunes. The title track is among his finest work from the mid-'70s, with its generous pop hook wrapped in shambling rhythms, laconic pace, nostalgic subject matter, and subtle, country-fried accents. The slow, powerful "Fountainebleau"--a story of rock-star hotel decadence--is "Powderfinger"-ish with some of Young's most nimble-fingered fretwork ever, and his vocals on "Midnight on the Bay" are stunningly on key. Unfortunately, Stephen Stills's musical muse was more than burnt out by the time this record was made, and "Guardian Angel" sounds like the cast of Godspell on a very off day. "Make Love to You," with its faux-soul keyboard runs, Stills's dying-moose moans, and the insanely cheesy "Hey baby, I just wanta make love to you"-type lyrics, sounds so ridiculous one half-expects Chef from South Park to jump out from behind the speakers, crooning into his spoon to an imaginary sexy lady. This album went gold, but luckily "The Stills-Young Band" was never heard from again after this messy, one-sided affair. --Mike McGonigal

30th ANNIVERSARY 3 DISC SET CONCERT DVD Never-before-seen 1975 concert from Hammersmith Odeon, London featuring over 2 hours of music. DOCUMENTARY DVD Definitive story of "Wings For Wheels: The Making of Born to Run" with new interviews & rare archival footage. BORN TO RUN CD First time in newly-remastered digital sound. Includes 48 page booklet of rare and unpublished photos.

The first retooling of any album in the mighty Springsteen catalog is an exemplary labor of love by Columbia. The original 1975 release was the make-or-break record of Bruce's career and arguably still his best collection of material. It is presented here on one disc unsullied by outtakes or inferior versions--just pristine digital remasters of those eight grittily romantic songs of street life that defined the artist's signature styles. The substantial bonuses are two new DVD programs, one featuring a full concert performance by Bruce and the E Street Band on their first date outside the U.S. at London's Hammersmith Odeon in November 1975, and the other a "making of" documentary including band interviews and contemporary concert footage. The whole handsome box truly honors a legendary recording while providing generous value for fans. The meat of the bonus material is the London show. A mythology has built around it that the band were so disorientated by travel and culture shock and Bruce so enraged by label-generated hype that they gave one of the worst performances of their career. Primitively shot by today's standards, the footage captures the brilliance of the relatively new band's ensemble playing. Highlights include a "Thunder Road" accompanied only by keyboards that opens the show, fiery solos on "Kitty's Back," a dynamic "Saint in the City," and a number of songs that have long since been retired. It's certainly notable how pensive and joyless Springsteen appears when compared to his later, animated stadium persona, but it's also fun to see the far greater role as foil played by Clarence Clemons. As he now testifies in the sleeve notes, putting lie to the myth, on that night they had "gone for broke," and as this writer can bear witness, the British audience exalted the show as the arrival of the greatest live performer of his generation. --Rob Stewart The Best of Bruce by guest editor Steve Perry Steve is the editor-in-chief of City Pages newspaper in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The Wild, the Innocent, and the E Street Shuffle (1973) After a folk-rockish debut album that bubbled with ideas and dense lyrical play, this is where Springsteen began to find his voice as a rocker and as a songwriter. The prisoner-of-love romanticism of "Rosalita" and "Incident on 57th Street" hinted at what was coming, and this early version of the E Street Band--jazzier and more spare than later versions, thanks largely to David Sancious's piano--sounds great, if a little ragged, these many years later. Born to Run (1975) and Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) These two records, which belong on any compilation of the top 100 rock albums of all time, sketched the themes that he would spend his whole career chasing, and defined the expectations fans would bring to his records ever after. The first chords of "Born to Run" sounded like freedom itself the first time I heard them on the radio, and the album lived up to them. "Thunder Road" is still the greatest rock & roll love song anyone's ever written. The record sounded so big and impassioned and propulsive it was easy to miss the dread running underneath it. Darkness... put the dread front and center. There are more of his best songs here than anywhere else, even if the sound is muddy and leaden at times. Nebraska (1982) After The River (the best record that didn't make this list) and the ensuing tour answered his rock & roll prayers--he was a big star now, not just a perennial critics' favorite--Springsteen holed up in a rented house on the Jersey shore, where he wrote these songs and sang them into a four-track recorder in his living room. The tape was supposed to be a demo for the band, but after several false tries he concluded that the tape he'd been carrying around in his pocket was the record. Quiet and bleak, Nebraska nonetheless grabbed you by the collar and made you listen as surely as his rock & roll records ever had. Tunnel of Love (1987) The glare and hubbub surrounding the Born in the USA tour (the tour was great--the record itself overrated) made him pull back again, this time to write a cycle of songs about love and fear and self-doubt. After this, Springsteen's first marriage broke up, and he started a family with Patti Scialfa, disappearing for the better part of 10 years, notwithstanding the pair of not-bad, just-disappointing albums he released in 1992, Human Touch and Lucky Town. The Ghost of Tom Joad (1995) Some call it Nebraska II, but his second acoustic album was not a repeat of his first--the characters and settings had changed, and their circumstances were more expressly desperate, and social--though it did share the same interest in what happens to people whose isolation or marginal status renders them invisible. The Rising (2002) Everybody, including Springsteen, seemed to think it was a record about 9/11, but the subject was broader--death and loss as seen from more than halfway down life's road. Dave Marsh nailed it: "A middle-aged man confronts death and chooses life" Brendan O'Brien's production sounds great.