Jerk Music Critic: Mark Ronson, Uptown Special

Get your friends together and groove because it's a funk party throwback album in 20-freaking-15, and all Ronson's buddies are coming here to jam. Sure, you have Bruno Mars and the chart topper "Uptown Funk," and it's so fun and fresh you can almost forgive the heavy rotation it gets. And yes, two Stevie Wonder artsy-fartsy bookend collabs smacks of stunt casting, and the callback in "Crack in the Pearl" was unnecessary. (Plus: Mystikal on "Feel Right" needs to chill the heck out.) But for as plastic and commercial as the production comes off, the Kevin Parker tracks ("Summer Breaking," the unironic use of the word isosceles in "Daffodils," and especially the gauzy, glittery edges of "Leaving Los Feliz") have real emotional heft to them, and "In Case of Fire" and "Heavy and Rolling" run silly, smooth and sparkly in suitable measure. Not consistent enough ("I Can't Lose" - oh really?) nor long enough to win that fifth star, but he certainly didn't send his guest performers home in the morning with nothing to show for it. (Content: F- and N-bombs on "Feel Right," mild expletives on "Uptown Funk," drug references in "Leaving Los Feliz.")

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Express Yourself

The Jerk Music Critic is a collection of amateur music reviews I wrote largely non-professionally between the 1990s and today. Some of these reviews are contemporary and some are retrospective, and a few are rather dated, but all are intended to be free-standing and permanent records of my completely worthless musical opinion. They are presented in no particular order and "new" reviews that occur may actually be simply prior ones I've only now transcribed. Older reviews have been edited to hopefully remove inaccuracies later revealed, as well as add brief content advisories (see "Smash the PMRC") and, where reissues exist with different tracks, brief commentaries on these later additions (the actual star review was not altered).

If you're looking for a specific artist, or just interested to see what I really liked (or really didn't), "When I Break Down" indexes reviews by artist and by number of stars awarded (see "Star Chart" for an explanation).

As we move deeper into the Internet music age where the album format might seem hopelessly antiquated, there is still some artistic value in the LP to those artists who still take advantage of it, and some of these recordings can only be properly appreciated in that context. I hope you enjoy these reviews and recommendations, and don't take them too seriously. — Cameron Kaiser

Star Chart

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An instant classic. Substantially advances/d the state of the art, either technologically, stylistically, or (preferentially) both, and is outstanding music besides. Buy it.

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A excellent album. Nearly every song is a gem; nearly every piece is a winner. Falls short of 5 stars for want of that certain special something, but the difference is in impact, not in musical quality. Buy it.

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Solid. Mostly good songs with a few clinkers. Salvageable with a good playlist. Buy it cheap.

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Mixed. Some good songs stand out, but not enough to make it listenable as a whole. Buy the good songs on iTunes.

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Bad. One or two tracks of even decent quality. Buy the good songs cheap on iTunes.

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How did this get released?

Smash the PMRC

I don't advocate for censorship or unnuanced black and white stickers, but I do advocate for parents being able to raise kids in the way they see fit, which might include introducing albums of controversial yet artistic merit at a point in their child's life when they can better appreciate it. The content summaries are intended to be a very general guide, reflective of only my own personal sensibilities and mine alone, and do not substitute in any way for a parent actually sitting down and listening to the album themselves. If you excessively rely on my content advisories, then I'm the one raising your kid, and you really don't want that.