Eternal Love, Eternal PRIDE!
I can't accurately calculate how many times I've spun this album. I can't even BELIEVE I found it in a bargain bin.
Because my tastes are so divergent, it becomes incredibly difficult to decide on one album to listen to for the rest of my life. So that album has to satisfy lots of my musical interests, even if it won't satisfy them all. And of course, it needs to have at least one anthemic song that compelled me to buy it in the first place. So dig it: my One Album For the Rest of My Life is…
PRIDE, Living Colour's Greatest Hits.
The guys in Living Colour established themselves as one of the definitive black rock bands of the 1980s and 90s, helping form the Black Rock Coalition with bands like Bad Brains and others. "Cult of Personality" was a huge hit, and my introduction to them. When I bought the album, though, I realized they were so much more than that. These guys were super-musicians, trained at the best music schools NYC had to offer. Their music wasn't just wild freak out guitar solos over heavy solid grooves, tighter-than-a-gnat's ass pocket and the most powerful singing in rock since Tom Jones or Freddie Mercury. No, no… the guys in LC were just as adept at funk, jazz, African high life music, drum and bass, reggae, and at least one of the best power ballads that criminally never seemed to get much play on the radio: "Broken Hearts."
Full confession: I cry when I hear that guitar solo, EVERY DAMN TIME. Something about the way it plays against the incredibly tasteful BASS solo just before it is perfection in a power pop song you NEVER hear anywhere else.
Why I don't just choose Vivid, from which both "Broken Hearts" and "Cult of Personality" hail, as well as the groove pop of "Glamour Boys", can be found in the wider scope of PRIDE, which contains tracks from all the other recorded output available to that point (no Collide-o-scope or Chair in the Doorway yet), including a RIDICULOUS live version of the Talking Heads' "Memories Can't Wait" as well as darker tunes from the Stain album. Of course, there's also the title track to Time's Up, as well as the aforementioned high life sunshine of "Solace of You". If you can't get up out of your seat to dance and smile to THAT track, you may just be dead. And hey, Living Colour doing dirgey, dubby tunes like "Happy Times" and "Visions" are way better than anyone else doing similar things.
Corey Glover has one of the best voices in rock. So good, in fact, that he toured as Judas Iscariot in Jesus Christ Superstar a few years ago. Vernon Reid's guitar skills are just mind-blowing, and Will Calhoun's drumming is peerless. I still miss Muzz Skillings, the original bassist, whose groove held it on lock for the first 2 albums. Of course, I can't complain about his replacement, Doug Wimbish, who has remained in the band since and thrown down some of the tastiest basslines on both fretted and fretless bass I've every heard. And hey, he was also the original house bassist on the Sugar Hill Gang's stuff way, way back when he was a teenager.
So, for that one-stop shopping of heavy metal, funk, jazz, power ballad, high life and such, PRIDE is my go-to for that desert island disc.
