The four hundred and fourth song: Only Women Bleed - Alice Cooper

Rather than a shocking rock song that you'd expect from Alice Cooper, this is a slower ballad, still with slightly more visceral imagery, but mostly just about an abusive relationship. While somewhat grand, it's quite sensitive as well, and that's what sounds impressive here. It does tug at your heartstrings and pulls it off well.

The four hundred and fifth song: Jive Talkin’ - Bee Gees

As we're seeing more of the rise of disco out of funk, the Bee Gees bring out Jive Talkin', a song drawing on black influences coming from a band out of north England. It's hard to argue that there wasn't something here about it becoming adapted to become appropriate, but the smooth sound and relatively subdued vocals give a calmer thing to listen to while having been ideal to dance to, which makes it good to listen to on its own merits.

The four hundred and sixth song: Jesus’ Blood Never Failed Me Yet - Gavin Bryars

At a length of twenty-six minutes, we've been dreading this one. It certainly takes its time building up, taking about four minutes for the first instrument to start playing. The fragment of song comes to life with that music, a classical composition that adds emotion to the entire thing. I think you need to approach it as that, the man's song another instrument in the composition, that this makes sense. The downside of the length is that it doesn't change it up quite enough and starts getting repetitive. There's some enchantment to the repetition, but it feels like it sometimes takes a bit too much time to shift. Even so, the piece is affecting and gets to you, especially knowing there's an anonymous homeless man who sang this and the place he must have been in. Still, it was good, just not twenty five minutes good.

The four hundred and seventh song: Boulder to Birmingham - Emmylou Harris

We're staying with sad songs, although not affecting in the same way, Boulder to Birmingham is about saying goodbye to someone who has passed. The story behind it is just as sad and the emotions here feel real too, it has a real feeling of loss. The emotion goes through it and the more you listen to the ballad, the more it gets to you.

The four hundred and eighth song: Fight the Power (Parts 1 & 2) - The Isley Brothers

For a shift in emotion, Fight the Power is not a sad song, but contains a lot of anger instead. There is still a lot of anger in the air and this funk song is a lot angrier than the genre usually is, a big protest song where it feels the music has shifted, giving a different tone. It's catchy in its own way, thrilling and tempting with a clear and ambigious meaning - anti-authoritarian without addressing a specific authority.

The one hundred twenty-third album: #123 Iron Butterfly - In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida

Iron Butterfly was a clear example of the rock bands as they were in the late 60s, incorporating an organ for that psychedelic feel with the heavier guitars that lean towards what became hard rock and metal. The vocals are appropriately gruff, the guitar riffs often fairly simple, with the organ adding the flourishes. The lyrics mostly feel fairly tame - still love songs and normal life songs, nothing rebelious or out there, which feels simple. The first half isn't overproduced either - these feel like songs that can be played easily at a concert, something not all rock of the time can claim.

The second half is a single seventeen minute song - or jam, really - with some lyrics but mostly showing off the instruments and creating a whole song. It feels like an early anthem, an ongoing hard rock sound that keeps going while still staying interesting. It's a sign of hard rock and metal, something this may have influenced, but certainly where rock is going towards.

The one hundred first TV show: #362 Das Boot

Das Boot is a war film... up to a point. While set on a submarine in the second world war, aside from some short sequences at the start and end, and one refuelling stop, the crew is isolated. They may hear bits of news over the radio, but they only have themselves to rely on. Even a passing sub in the distance is something you can only wave at and send light signals to, you can never really get close.

It creates camaraderie and tension and while the movie plays with that, too, the bigger threat is the danger of the environment. Dive too deep and the sub can't take it - you need to patch it up and fix things. You're mostly defenseless against a bunch of threats. You're a lonely island to defend the mainland, but can't go anywhere. It creates a psychological drama that's intense already.

Then there are the attacks. The ships and planes that do are faceless - frightening big things you'd like to take down but that harm you just as much. The sub recovering from those and the crew pulling together to do so lead to some of the most harrowing, challenging scenes while also feeling genuinely tense.

The tension comes from the filming environment as well. Everything is small and constrained and even the camera has to carefully weave around everything, as the set was built to scale. It's expertly done, but you feel that oppression at all times. The atmosphere comes across in every scene and these six episodes felt like they flew by because of it.

The fifty-ninth comic: #918 Fun Home

Now, we watched the play of this, which makes it weirder that we didn't check it - we saw the play, went to read the book, and were amazed by it. This is an odd coming of life story, both about Alison's Bechdel discovery that she was lesbian and her father's closeted appearance as a gay or bisexual man. There are so many added complications to this, not worth mentioning here, that mean the story is about more than just that, about the psychological struggles of her father and how she never got through to him even after her coming out - the play ends with an incredibly emotional scene where she asks him for answers and never gets them. It's not as big in the comic, but there are many more small stories, anecdotes about life that set the scene. The art isn't too complicated, distinctive and enough to set the scene. But it's the story that resonates most, not just the coming out story, but that about not understanding a closed off father, where you never learn everything, and some things only come out afterwards. It really hit me - possibly from the musical, possibly from the comic, but in either way from a well told story.

The One Hundred Twenty-Second Album: #122 Dr. John, The Night Tripper - Gris Gris

When I first saw this described as blues rock from New Orleans, it threw me a bit, but listening here it makes complete sense.There's something jazzy in this, but the slow vocals almost immediately talking about voodoo complement the semi-French song titles that you associate with the bajou. It's quite compelling, not in the last part from Dr. John's performance itself, which has a lot of charisma, sounding unpredictable while not being threatening. It's off, a bit crazy, but it's all good.

The fifty-eighth comic: #603 King

Having gone through a few autobiographies on the list, having a proper biography in comic form is quite nice. Going in to take a look at the life of Martin Luther King, this is quite striking. For a large part, the art work is a bit abstract, with stylized lines rather than a more realistic look, you lose some of the emotion, which is more conveyed through words. Instead, though, this focuses more on the events, at times letting the speeches of MLK speak for those emotions more than anything else.

It also doesn't shy away from the truth - MLK as a flawed being, who made soem big changes but whose personal life wasn't always as together - something that sometimes impacted his message too. I liked the use of colour as well. It slowly sneaks in through the volumes, something that I suspect is clearer in the three individual volumes than the collection I read, and starts to make an impact especially as things come to a head. It's an impressive work, sympathetic but feeling real as well.

The fifty-eighth classical recording: #73 George Frideric Handel - Water Music

Yeah, it's been a busy few days - this and the next piece were both live as they were performed for a radio broadcast we attended in the Royal Festival Hall. Water Music is the more abstract of the two pieces, made for an outside performance (originally on boats floating down the Thames) and it feels it. It's big and majestic, the brass instruments having a lot of space that ends up feeling like a call and response sequence. It's big, it's fast with a lot of power behind it and seeing the performers get into it really enhanced all of that.

The fifty-ninth classical recording: #54 Henry Purcell - Dido and Aeneas

The second piece of the evening is the first (known) English language opera. We were probably helped by knowing the myth, as in an hour this keeps up the speed, avoiding the lengthy monologues we get in some other operas. As always, it helped that we saw it live, with the passion of the singers showing through. One thing that impressed me was the use of the choir - sometimes as an instrument, at other times to tell the story and sometimes to create really creepy laughs. Beyond that, the score makes heavy use of lutes, especially when singing as the quieter sound work well as a backup, rather than overpowering the performers. It was one of the best pieces we've seen live for this list and it really makes me excited to see more operas.

The fifty-seventh comic: #151 MAD

Sometimes, the format of this list limits what we read. In this case, it's MAD magazine that's known and beloved. For the list, however, we're looking at the 23 issues of the preceeding comic book. While, I suppose, still iconic as the source, it resembles titles like Shock and Suspenstories a lot closer. It has two or three stories that, this time, are humorous rather than horror like, often parodying existing stories or tropes, but still in a more rigid form. Sometimes it hits, and the more experimental parts towards the end of the run do so a lot more often - I'd say it starts working for me around issue 15 - but too often it's too dense and the jokes don't land because of that. I've started reading the magazine too, and it's slightly better, but for the most part, this specific entry is too much part of that time to enjoy here.

The one hundredth TV show: #949 Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Starting this list coincided with us giving up this show - not because of the list, but because we were generally overwhelmed by shows to watch. I'm not sure why we gave this up, but I guess that's how our time went. The cast of the show is great, with Andy Samberg as a charismatic, goofy but capable enough lead. The show is more of an ensemble show, though, with a number of characters who are larger than life, mostly goofy, with enough character to create stories on their own. There are a bunch of great performances here that mean the show stays just as weird.

All the small touches, tiny gags that lead nowhere, but create life in the show, keep the show interesting and I keep wondering why we gave it up - the Nine Nine is back on our list.

The ninety-ninth TV show: #894 Revenge

While we watched the first season of Revenge, we never went back to it afterwards - possibly not a bad decision, now I've continued watching the second season for the blog. The first story was a fascinating story of revenge, sometimes twisting itself to make sure there's a victim of the week, but overall building up to some great moments and making for a compelling watch. The second season moves into more standard intrigue, a bunch of it feeling almost standard soap opera fare, and the story feels like it loses its impact. I've not really seen how it goes from much further after that, but it's the first season that really stood out for me - a great story of revenge that fits in a lot of character development around keeping the per episode plot moving forward, creating some decent themes that push it beyond standard drama fare.

The one hundred twenty-first album: #121 The United States of America - The United States of America

At a time where a lot of rock bands were experimenting, it feels like The United States of America is even further out there. Just listening to the first track, it's hard to imagine them being able to repeat the feat of how unique the electronic sound is. It's repeated and imitated, but often to try to make it more of a song, while this feels like it's just trying things from start to finish.

There's bits of everything in there, which makes for a weird experience. It's not always coherent, and while those clashes may sometimes be intentional, I don't think it works as a single product either. Basically, what we get is a bunch of experiments, going poppy, rocky and psychedelic in different places, and there are some places where it works, some that don't, and on the whole it's a bit unsatisfying compared to something that focused on a thing. I guess more than that, it works as inspiration to other artists - and I know we'll see that later with, for example, the Beatles.

The ninety-eighth TV show: #120 Ultraman

Tokusatsu - basically shows around superheroes often fighting men in rubber suits - is a long running genre that's probably most known for sentai, which spawned Power Rangers. Ultraman could be argued to be the first - although its predecessor series has the monsters and Godzilla has been around for ages, this show is the first with a superhero character that fights them, while they're giant, including a transformation sequence.

A lot of the show relies on models work, not too different from Thunderbirds but with a human walking through them. It's fairly impressive to see and quite convincing for the most part. Unfortunately, in most episodes the most exciting parts - the big monster fights - are restricted to the last few minutes, probably because of cost. It means that the plot needs to carry a lot of weight, and that doesn't always work out well. Of the science team that's the focus of the series, only some characters are interesting (Ide probably most of all) and the side characters are a mixed bag. Parts of the show explore some interesting ideas, but they're too often mixed in with generic plots that they get quite boring.

The drive to include this show here is that it represents a major Japanese genret hat hasn't made it out elsewhere, but it feels like the story telling isn't quite there yet to pull it off.