* - Asterisk means I already had a good mp3 copy of this album, but threw up a few words anyway in the name of having an internet-based chronicle of all my legally-purchased, store-bought music

- Beavis Having Rad Times means that this CD's purchase was directly or indirectly influenced by the Beavis & Butthead television show, STOP ALL THE DOWNLOADIN' means the CD was only bought after an illegal trial period

B

Bad Brains - Bad Brains (1982, ROIR) - Oh man, the ROIR tape, the one Bad Brains record that everyone who only legally owns one Bad Brains record legally owns. I might be a poser, you guys. Somehow, I found my copy at Goodwill, which is weird, because what kind of maniac gives that to Goodwill? I could buy someone stealing it out of a car and pawning it, pawn shop dudes all trying to look legit when every CD they sell has no case, and a nearby shelf is just absolutely lousy with empty Cd wallets and visor CD holder thingies. I wish cops would make some loophole, so a pawnshop could just name their store something like "Dave's Stolen Goods" or "Drugs are More Important Than This Guitar Thrift and Pawn." Everybody knows that half of what's in there is stolen and the other half is the result of unfathomable sadness. But anyway, the music sections of Goodwill are usually just records from people whose Mamaw died and they don't know what to do with some 101 Strings or Herb Alpert records, mixed in with random CD-ROM games from 1994, so this being in there was nigh-inexplicable. What if someone's Mamaw was into hardcore punk and reggae, and their grandkids were just boring little shits?

B.B. King - Every Day I Have the Blues (2004, Echo Bridge)- I dunno, every so often, you can find neat crap on the shelves near the registers at the Ross Dress for Less.  It's weird, though, because this CD sounds off to me. I know some of it is live and some of it is unfathomably old, but it all sounds like someone making a tape recorder bootleg of a regular-sounding record from across the room. Was recording equipment really that bad back in the day, and this sounds reasonably fine, or am I just tripping? Did Scott Burns produce records for the King of the Blues, before Roadrunner Records hired him to make all that old death metal sound like hell? A mystery for the ages.

Belladonna - Belladonna (1995, Mausoleum) - Man, this, I dunno. This should be good, but it mostly just makes me sad. It's Anthrax's singer with Anthrax's old producer making Anthrax-sounding music, but I just never could get into this. Like the first song starts by lifting a section from "In My World," and maybe I'm reading too much into this, but some of it sounds like the most sour of grapes regarding his old band, and that's understandable, but it gets grating after a while. Maybe he should've just taken 15 years or so off and seen about rejoining Anthrax, that would probably be a good idea that I thought of.

Bill Cosby - ... Far From Finished (2CDs -  2013, Comedy Central) - Haha oh sweet Jesus fuck, I'm not touching this one. I really think he actually is finished, though.

Billy Joel - Songs in the Attic (1981, Columbia) - I'm pretty sure that my wife has actual musical taste, so she listens to music for grownups on occasion. Not much to say about this, aside from that I thought it was way older for some reason, and I always thought he was singing "Captain Jack will get you high tonight." I'm sure someone's done a parody of that song that actually says that, and I bet it was super clever if you've never read books.

Bitch - Be My Slave / Damnation Alley (1982/1983, Metal Blade) - I still hold to my theory that Betsy Bitch was once a nice girl from an upstanding middle-class family who loved her a great deal and supported her love of music and bought her singing lessons, and then teen rebellion kicked in and she started a metal band named Bitch and started singing songs about tying dudes up and whipping them, and GODDAMMIT BETSY, YOU ARE BREAKING YOUR MOTHER'S HEART. Anyway, this always felt like it should be terrible, but really isn't, but also is not super-good, either. Either way, it doesn't matter, because when Metal Blade would put a 99-cent clearance sale on the old website, you could just go nuts and not care about the consequences.

Black Flag - Damaged (1981, SST) - Black Flag is pretty much the official soundtrack to teenage male-type dudes who hate things and know that punk exists, but I never bothered with them until I was around 23 or so, even though I was in close proximity to several punk rockers in my misspent youth. And even at that older age, when I was a real mean sack of shit, I didn't like this at all. Fast forward a few years, at a point when I was pushing thirty and fat and happy and just hugged cats all day, I gave Black Flag another shot, and all of a sudden I was like "YYEEEEEAAAHHH, SPRAY! PAINT! THE! WALLS!" I'll never be able to figure that one out.

Black Flag - The First Four Years (1983, SST) - As far as the actual sound of any of the singers Black Flag had are concerned, Henry Rollins was my favorite singer of the bunch, but their best stuff was all done before he was in the band. (and really, once you get past Damaged, it gets real iffy sometimes) So this is the absolute goddamn best, even if you just put "Nervous Breakdown" on and endless loop and never acknowledge the existence of the rest of it. Just whenever someone invents time travel, maybe after they kill Baby Hitler, they can teach Spot how to produce records, because man, so much of this just *sounds* so bad.

BLACK SABBATH GAUNTLET

Blood for Blood - Serenity EP (2004, Thorp) - After my copy of Livin' in Exile disappeared, this is the only Blood for Blood Cd I legally own, because I got super into them right around that magical, decadent period in late 2002 when the move to Oklahoma gave me high speed internet, I found out that the file-sharing program Soulseek existed, and I realized that everything on earth was free, so long as you stole it. So I always *almost* go back and buy some of that stuff, (or at least replace the missing CD) but then I get all creeped out because Buddha got busted for trying to force himself on a 14 year old a few years back, and then I hit the back button and window-shop elsewhere. Maybe I should just PayPal like 20 bucks directly to White Trash Rob or something.

*Bob Marley - Bob Marley Box Set (4CDs, 2011, Wagram) - So, uhh, we've had this set for like three weeks I think, and got it right around the same time as a bunch of other stuff (tax refund season) and I have literally never listened to it. I'm sure it's perfectly fine, even if it is kind of a weird scattering of decidedly  non-"greatest hits" kinda stuff, with a tribute Cd tacked on at the end. It's odd, because so much about this screams "cheap CD you find by the register at Big Lots," but the tribute part looks like it had some real effort put into it, with people I've heard of and everything, like Sinead O'Connor and Dennis Brown. Anyway, only having compilation-type Bob Marley stuff (as opposed to regular albums) in your possession is one of the whitest things a person can do, and lord, I try real hard to fight against it, but every so often, I just have to honor the traditions of my people.

Body Count - Body Count (1992, Sire) -

YEEEEEEEEEEAHHHH MUTHAFUCKAAAAAAAAAA, BODY COUNT, N-WOOOOOOOOOOORD

Sadly, I have the false second-pressing of this that doesn't have "Copkiller" on it, which obviously sucks, because it's a reminder of the time that Ice-T totally just rolled over in the face of pressure from The Man, but also because that was the best track off the real version of this. So we do what we must, which is to download a copy of copkiller.mp3 and just change the digitized track numbers for everything else, to simulate it being the real thing. You take the small victories where you can get them, I guess.

Body Count - Born Dead (1994, Virgin) - I got this off Ebay back in the day, and my copy has got bigass stickers all over it indicating that it is now and forever record company property and that it can never be sold and that it "must be returned on demand." So I've spent the better part of 20 years living in fear, wondering if and when Richard Branson was going to show up in my front yard, all stepping out of a blimp or a hovercraft or something, demanding upon pain of death that I return his copy of Born Dead by Body Count immediately.

Body Count - Violent Demise: The Last Days (1997, Virgin) - The first track off this rules, because it's a rap-metal collaboration with a group from Ice-T's label called Raw Breed, and it includes a dude named Bizarra who sounds like a cartoon monster and just yells wild shit like "I'M HIGH AND DUSTED, RAAAARGH, NARCOTIC" the whole time. Sometimes, I want to get onto the Googles and find out whatever became of that dude, but based on his behavior here, I'm sure nothing good could have happened, like he probably died trying to fist fight a live jaguar or rob an army base or something. YEAH IT'S RAW BREED, B.C., KILLIN OVERSEAS, DROPPIN OFF ROOFTOPS, PUNKS HANG FROM TREES

Bruce Dickinson - The Chemical Wedding (1998, CMC International) - Somehow, I missed this when it initially came out, probably due to the lack of access from being in rural Mississippi with no job, 56K welfare internet, and no record stores for like 30 miles. After a few years of people telling me how this was a life-changing masterpiece of pure genius, greater perhaps than any of Bruce's Iron Maiden material, I finally picked it up in maybe 2007 or so, and it's... Okay, I guess. I mean, I really have nothing bad to say about it, but it didn't really blow my dick to the back of the room, either, you know?

The Bruce Lee Band - The Bruce Lee Band (1996, Asian Man) - Haha, oh man, the late 90s happened, so here's a ska CD. Won't be many of those, relatively speaking, but there are at least a few more of these I'll get to eventually. The Bruce Lee Band (B. Lee Band, if you're one of Bruce Lee's lawyers) is a side project of Mike Park from Skankin' Pickle, so this basically sounds a lot like them, but with some occasional acoustic stuff. It's funny, because I flew half-blind into this one, since the song that I had previously heard before placing a "well-concealed cash" order to No Idea Records for this and some other stuff sounded nothing like anything else on here. It worked out in the end, because this is good, and even if it had sucked, I seriously think it was like $6 at a time when $18 was semi-reasonable for a CD.

Brujeria - The Mexicutioner! The Best of Brujeria (2003, Roadrunner) - For the longest time, I would take semi-weekly trips to the local Hastings and *almost* buy Matando Gueros by these dudes, but I never did. Because every time, I'd flash back to the time I bought some magazine, like Terrorizer or Metal Hammer, and it had a cover price of $6.66, and the cashier gave me a shitty look and made some shitty comment, and I'd like to tell y'all that I stood up for Heavy Metal and hissed at the guy and yelled "DEVIL! DEVIIIILLLLL!!" like David Putty did to that priest in the one Seinfeld episode, but honestly, I just kind of shamefully slunk out of the place with my magazine, feeling kind of shitty for upsetting the sensibilities of someone who had even more delicate ones than my own. So no way in hell was I going to risk blowing someone's goddamn mind out with a CD that had a real photo of a literal burned-up severed head on the cover. And that's why I just have the "best of" CD.