Best 50 Cent Music

[Pernille Pennebaker]

Inretrospect, I was not ready to become a doctor, and I avoided class by playing music with a sitarist. He told me about an opening in the Philosophy Department where he was a junior professor. It seemed like a great opportunity, even though I only took two philosophy courses in college.

I learned to listen. I learned to play what came to me in the moment. I learned not to be scared to play the wrong note. And most of all, I learned how to connect with others and help them sound good in the process.

Our brains are wired for music, and this is likely one of the major reasons for its universality. Research has shown that the pentatonic scale, in all cultures, is a means of coordinating infant and maternal communication. The pentatonic scale is commonly used in traditional music around the globe.

This has led many scientists to postulate that the way our brains are constructed is receptive to this particular scale. Studies show that we are attracted to and utilize scales, like the pentatonic scale, that are built upon the natural harmonic series of notes.

There is more evidence. Researchers have found that we are drawn to certain intervals of notes (two notes played together or in sequence) because it resembles speech. For example, the minor third which has been known to convey sadness. Studies have shown that the very same interval is one in which sadness is perceived in human verbal communication. If the minor third is universally evocative of sadness, it not only suggests how our brains are wired, but also reinforces the fact that music causes us to feel certain emotions.

Music is the best studied of art therapy, and helps to lower anxiety, depression, trauma, psychosis and stress. Important components of music therapy are the meaning of lyrics, improvisational music playing, active listening, and songwriting.

Gene Beresin, MD, MA is executive director of The MGH Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds, and a staff child and adolescent psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital. He is also...

A few years ago, my friend Jill Sternheimer and I started a conversation one night while driving around the streets of New Orleans. Both of us are music nerds, and we regularly attend the kinds of musical retrospectives that have become common in this age of historical exploration via tribute shows and historical playlists. Jill, in fact, often organizes such shows at Lincoln Center Out of Doors, where she is the director of public programs. I sometimes write about them, and often ponder how music history's being recorded and revised in the digital age. Why, we wondered, was the importance of women so often recognized as a trend instead of a source of lasting impact? We came to a conclusion that, in 2017, will likely strike no one as a surprise: that the general history of popular music is told through the great works of men, and that without a serious revision of the canon, women will always remain on the margins.

Those lists are roosters that lay eggs. What came first, the idea that men make more historically significant music than women do, or the institutionalization of a group of albums men made? Because the vast majority of lists extend from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band to Thriller to Nevermind to OK Computer, with something by Joni Mitchell or Aretha Franklin showing up around No. 30, the paradigms that define greatness remain masculine at their core. This means that The Beatles represent modernity instead of Nina Simone, and Bob Dylan stands for poeticism made populist while Mitchell or Franklin only do so secondarily. It places Nirvana and Pearl Jam at the center of the 1990s rock renaissance, never suggesting that Alanis Morrisette or P.J. Harvey belong in that same spot. It maintains the notion that hip hop's golden era belonged to rappers like Biggie and Tupac instead of Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill. It obscures the fact that contemporary country's biggest influence is not Willie Nelson or Merle Haggard (or even Garth Brooks), but Shania Twain. It makes it difficult to see that Jay Z still has a major career as an artist mostly because of Beyonc.

Affirmative action offers one possible corrective to this skewed view of the musical past, and present. (As Rhiannon Giddens says, the past is always present.) Why not remake those old lists and up the numbers of women on them? The problem is, once a canon is formed, it gains an aura of immutability. To significantly alter it requires a shift in perspective beyond the simple mandate to adjust the numbers. If this were not true, then at least one of the endless array of lists generated in print, on television, in film documentaries and on the Web would have an album by a woman at the top. None has. Furthermore, there have been only scant numbers of lists focusing exclusively on albums by women.

In building a new canon, Turning the Tables contributors kept wide parameters. We left room for acknowledged rock-era classics as well as pop hits dismissed by others as fluff. There are debuts here that changed music's game, and one-offs whose impact mostly affected small communities. There are works that speak strongly and directly about women's experience, and ones whose makers have sought to erase the boundaries of gender. The original list of nominees was more than 500 albums deep, assembled by all of the voters who participated and presented without bias to the whole group.

Our voters participate in the culture of popular music in different ways, and that's one reason this list, while canonical, is also very diverse. Some are critics who engage in daily conversations about issues of musical taste and legitimacy. Others are radio producers or hosts regularly working with musicians and incorporating music into NPR coverage. Still others are the 21st-century version of old-fashion DJ's, absorbing new music every day to create a listening experience that extends from pop history and pushes it forward. Voters also range in age from their 20s to their 60s. The very different ways these women engage with music has made for a list that reflects widely held ideas about what is canonical, but which also challenges them.

The list's top artists are both expected and, especially in their rankings, a surprise. Albums placed far apart from each other on other best lists relate to each other in interesting ways when they appear consecutively, telling stories that cross regional, generational and style divides. It will surprise few readers that Joni Mitchell's universally lauded Blue is No. 1 on our list, but that it nearly tied with The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill says much: The latter album spoke to a different generation about love and independence, and women's proper place within a changing culture, in ways very similar to its forebear. Nina Simone, currently enjoying a renaissance spurred on by black feminist reconsiderations of her work, strongly secured the third spot. Four and five continue this trend of intergenerational exchange, with Missy Elliott's Supa Dupa Fly, which anticipated the electronic thrum of 21st-century pop three years before the millennium, standing just ahead of Aretha Franklin's I Never Loved A Man, which in the 1960s shaped the sound of soul.

Why create a canon of women's works at all? A scene from Joni Mitchell's days in Laurel Canyon, which would soon motivate her to record Blue, proves illuminating. Mitchell was working with David Crosby on her first, self-titled album, and they'd frequently attend parties at the houses of friends like Cass Elliott or the screenwriter Carl Gottlieb. Gottlieb later told music historian Barney Hoskyns that Crosby would have Joni wait in another room after they arrived. At a lull in the conversation he'd tell the crowd that he wanted to introduce someone. Mitchell would emerge, play a few songs and retreat. "She goes back upstairs, and we all sit around and look at each other and say, 'What was that? Did we hallucinate it?" Gottlieb said.

But there's also something off and sadly typical about this scene. In it, the female musician is a dream, a surprise and a disruptor. She can claim the center of attention, but her rightful point of origin, and the place to which she returns, is a margin.

Now consider another scene, this one presented by the literary scholars Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their 1979 study The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. They recognized that women had, for a century, been reading an alternate history of literature into existence, a "canon that lived in the mind of every femme moyenne intellectuelle who spent her girlhood avidly devouring the classics of female imagination produced by Austen and the Bronts, Mary Shelley and George Eliot, and yes, if the girl liked poetry, Emily Dickinson." Gilbert and Gubar's scenario of women trading worn paperbacks back and forth and having long discussions about Pride and Prejudice in comparison to Wuthering Heights doesn't isolate any one female writer as exceptional, instead placing them in dialogue with each other in ways that change the idea of what great literature can be. Acknowledging only women writers, this vision might be viewed as extreme, a form of separatism that as isolating in its own way as keeping the best female artist at a gathering in a separate room. Yet when feminists like Gilbert and Gubar did create new canons of women's literature, in books like the 1986 landmark Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, it changed the game. More books by women were taught in college courses. Some titles lost to time, like Kate Chopin's The Awakening, were rediscovered. Arguments about these new canons ensued, and resulted in more change, including greater acknowledgment of women of color and women writing beyond North America. The changes stuck. A 2011 study found a direct correlation between the publication of the anthology and greater gender balance among authors considered central to world literature in general.

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