rolling_stone_top_500_albums_2020

Rank Artist Album Info Description

500 Arcade Fire Merge, 2004 Loss, love, forced coming-of-age, and fragile generational hope: Arcade Fire’s debut touched on all these themes as it defined the independent rock of the ‘00s. Built on family ties (leader Win Butler, his wife, Régine Chassagne, his brother Will), the Montreal band made symphonic rock that truly rocked, simultaneously outsize and deeply personal, like the best pop. But for all its sad realism, Butler’s is music that still finds solace, and purpose, in communal celebration.

499 Rufus, Chaka Khan Ask Rufus ABC, 1977 Fronted by Chaka Khan, one of soul music’s most combustible singers, Rufus built its mid-Seventies sound on heavy-footed, guitar-slathered funk. But after spending 16 months in the studio working on Ask Rufus, they came out with a record that gave their songs more room to breathe, anticipating the lithe, loose arrangements of Nineties neo-soul. Khan glided through the head-nodding “Everlasting Love” and the twisty-turny “Better Days,” and fans appreciated the adjustment: Ask Rufus was the group’s first platinum record.

498 Suicide Suicide Red Star, 1977 These New York synth-punks evoke everything from the Velvet Underground to rockabilly. Martin Rev’s low-budget electronics are violent and hypnotic; Alan Vega screams as a rhythmic device. Late-night listening to “Frankie Teardrop,” a 10-minute-plus tale of a multiple murder, is not recommended. A droning voice in the wilderness when they appeared in the Seventies, the duo would influence bands from Arcade Fire and the National to Bruce Springsteen, who covered Suicide live in 2016.

497 Various Artists The Indestructible Beat of Soweto Earthworks, 1985 The greatest album ever to be marketed under the heading “world music,” this 1985 compilation of South African pop was a huge influence on Paul Simon’s Graceland that still sounds jarringly fresh today. Full of funky, loping beats and gruff, Howling Wolf-style vocals (most prominently from “goat voiced” star Mahlathini). With a sweet track by Graceland collaborators Ladysmith Black Mambazo (“Nansi Imali”), its badass joy needed no translation.

496 Shakira Dónde Están los Ladrones Columbia, 1998 Long before she went blond and took her never-lying hips to the top of the American pop charts, Shakira was a raven-haired guitar rocker who’d hit peak superstardom in the Spanish-speaking world with her 1995 LP, Pies Descalzos. To keep up the momentum, Shakira enlisted Emilio Estefan to help produce her next LP, this stellar globetrotting dance-rock set, which blends sounds from Colombia, Mexico, and her father’s native Lebanon.

495 Boyz II Men II Motown, 1991

494 The Ronettes Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes Philles, 1964

493 Marvin Gaye Here, My Dear Tamla/Motown, 1978

492 Bonnie Raitt Nick of Time Capitol, 1989 After being dumped by her previous label, blues rocker Bonnie Raitt exacted revenge with this multiplatinum Grammy-award winner, led by an on-fire version of John Hiatt’s “Thing Called Love” and the brilliant title track, a study in midlife crisis told from a woman’s perspective. Producer Don Was helped her sharpen the songs without sacrificing any of her slide-guitar fire. And as Raitt herself pointed out, her 10th try was “my first sober album.”

491 Harry Styles Fine Line Columbia, 2019 Harry Styles achieved pop greatness with One Direction, but he got even deeper on his own. On Fine Line, he stakes his claim as one of his generation’s most savagely imaginative musical minds. Styles breathes in the 1970s California sunshine of his heroes — Joni Mitchell, David Bowie, Stevie Nicks — with soulful breakup songs. As he explained, “It’s all about having sex and feeling sad.” Yet the music is drenched in starman joy: the ‘shroomadelic guitar trip “She,” the dulcimer-crazed “Canyon Moon,” the Number One juicy-fruit beach orgy “Watermelon Sugar.”

490 Linda Ronstadt Heart Like a Wheel Capitol, 1975

489 Phil Spector and Various ArtistsBack to Mono (1958-1969) ABKCO, 1991

488 The Stooges The Stooges Elektra, 1969 Fueled by “a little marijuana and a lotta alienation,” Michigan’s Stooges gave the lie to hippie idealism, playing with a savagery that unsettled even the most blasé clubgoers. Ex-Velvet Underground member John Cale produced a primitive debut wherein, amid Ron Asheton’s wah-wah blurts, Iggy Stooge (né James Osterberg) snarled seminal punk classics such as “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “No Fun,” and “1969,” bedrock examples of the weaponized boredom that would become a de rigueur punk posture.

487 Black Flag Damaged SST, 1981

486 John Mayer Continuum Columbia, 2006

485 Richard and Linda Thompson I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonig Island, 1974

484 Lady Gaga Born This Way Interscope, 2011

483 Muddy Waters The Anthology MCA, 2001 Muddy Waters started out playing acoustic Delta blues in Mississippi, but when he moved to Chicago in 1943, he needed an electric guitar to be heard over the tumult of South Side clubs. The sound he developed was the foundation of Chicago blues — and rock & roll; the thick, bleeding tones of his slide work anticipated rock-guitar distortion by nearly two decades. The 50 cuts on these two CDs run from guitar-and-stand-up-bass duets to full-band romps — and they still just scratch the surface of Waters’ legacy.

482 The Pharcyde Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde Delicious Vinyl, 1992

481 Belle and Sebastian If You’re Feeling Sinister Jeepster, 1996

480 Miranda Lambert The Weight of These Wings eRCA Nashville, 2016

479 Selena Amor Prohibido EMA Latin, 1994 Tejana star Selena Quintanilla-Pérez may not have been long for this world (she died when she was just 23), but she remains one of America’s most beloved singer-songwriters. At the heart of her regional Mexican masterwork, Amor Prohibido, is a universal, glittering pop core. The techno-cumbia title track tells the real-life story of her grandparents, who fell in love across class lines. It’s a Latina fairy tale, if ever there was one. Amor Prohibido, meaning “forbidden love,” became one of the bestselling Latin albums of all time.

478 The Kinks Something Else by the Kinks Pye, 1968

477 Howlin’ Wolf Moanin' in the Moonlight Chess, 1959 “That man was the natural stuff,” Buddy Guy said. “His fists were as big as a car tire.” The Wolf had the biggest roar in Chicago blues — he raved in a fierce growl, backed by explosive playing from guitar geniuses Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin. His 1959 debut album has some of the meanest electric blues ever heard, cut for Chess Records, from the eerie railroad drone “Smokestack Lightnin’” to the lowdown “I Asked for Water (She Gave Me Gasoline).”

476 Sparks Kimono My House Island, 1974

475 Sheryl Crow Sheryl Crow A&M, 1996 The Missouri gal finally got to make an album her way, in 1996, with her self-titled, self-produced smash — an ingenious mix of roots-rock raunch and vengeful wit. As Crow told Rolling Stone, “My only objective on this record was to get under people’s skin, because I was feeling like I had so much shit to hurl at the tape.” “Every Day Is a Winding Road” and “A Change Would Do You Good” rock like a feminist Exile on Main Street, while “If It Makes You Happy” became an anthem for bad girls of all ages.

474 Big Star #1 Record Ardent, 1972

473 Daddy Yankee Barrio Fino V.I. Music, 2004 Just when Latin pop radio was hitting a ballad-heavy plateau, Puerto Rican MC Daddy Yankee set the industry aflame with his 2004 reggaeton opus, Barrio Fino. Crowned by the hydraulic bounce of Yankee’s first international hit, “Gasolina,” the record marked a colossal breakthrough, not just for the rapper himself, but for the entire genre known as reggaeton: a raw blend of hip-hop and reggae, born in the mean streets of San Juan.

472 SZA Ctrl RCA, 2017

471 Jefferson Airplane Surrealistic Pillow RCA, 1967

470 Juvenile 400 Degreez Cash Money, 1998 From the moment Juvenile asked, “That’s you with that bad ass benz?” and punctuated the bar with a cocky, dismissive “Ha,” rap’s axis tilted. The New Orleans rapper’s third album reorientated hip-hop toward a new Southern sound, driven by producer Mannie Fresh’s intergalactic beats. “Ha” and “Back That Azz Up” were earthshaking singles, and Juvenile’s young-but-old growl brought out the blues in “Ghetto Children” and Dickensian horror in “Gone Ride With Me.” 400 Degreez added new sonic textures that pop music is still mining.

469 Manu Chao Clandestino Virgin, 1998 Born in Paris to Spanish parents, Manu Chao is a true citizen of the world on his 1998 debut. Clandestino, was a tribute to “clandestinos” everywhere: a derogatory term for undocumented migrants. Running on an internationalist platform of peace (and legalized pot), Chao was a digital busker (“a clown making too much dirty sound”), strumming his acoustic guitar as he moved effortlessly between languages and styles, singing with a playfully light touch as he made feel-good reggae rock for global nomads like himself.

468 The Rolling Stones Some Girls Rolling Stones, 1978

467 Maxwell BLACKsummers’night Columbia, 2009 Maxwell was a successful Nineties neo-soul crooner who went on an eight-year hiatus between 2001’s Now and this 2009 release. BLACKSummers’night betrays no anxiety about the time off; in fact, it ranks among the great comeback records. Maxwell sang about post-breakup desperation as he navigated plush, complicated grooves with jazz players like Keyon Harrold and Derrick Hodge giving his arrangements extra zip. The album’s ecstatic triumph is “Pretty Wings,” a keening, chiming lullaby.

466 The Beach Boys The Beach Boys Today! Capitol, 1965 “I only tried surfing once, and the board almost hit me in the head,” Brian Wilson told Rolling Stone in 1999. But Wilson turned his fantasies into a California dream world of fast cars and cool waves — a world that might even have room for a scared misfit like him. Yet even in this early phase, Wilson was writing yearningly complex tunes — “She Knows Me Too Well” feels like Greek tragedy translated into doo-wop harmonies and surf guitars.

465 King Sunny Adé The Best of the Classic Years Shanachie, 2003 Some of the sweetest, stickiest jams ever recorded, cherry-picked from the Nigerian juju master’s work from 1967 to 1974, years before he got marketed as “the next Bob Marley.” King Sunny’s slow-roll guitar stretches out toward the horizon, rippling over verdant grooves to create a spellbinding vibe even (or especially) when a song saunters on for 18 minutes. Talking Heads and Phish are just two of the bands who’ve proudly cited the sound of Adé’s music as a guiding influence.

464 The Isley Brothers 3+3 T-Neck, 1973 The Isley Brothers ballooned from a trio that impressed the Beatles to a six-piece band on 3 + 3, which helped establish them as a funk force in the 1970s. The hit “That Lady” is stuffed with laser-bright guitar solos, and the slow numbers (including a cover of James Taylor’s “Don’t Let Me Be Lonely Tonight,” in which Ron Isley unfurled his heartbreaking falsetto and forceful midrange) hint toward the band’s bright future as pre-eminent balladeers in R&B’s Quiet Storm era.

463 Laura Nyro Eli & the 13th Confession Columbia, 1968

462 The Flying Burrito Brothers The Gilded Palace of Sin A&M, 1969

461 Bon Iver For Emma Jagjaguwar, 2008

460 Lorde Melodrama Universal, 2017 Lorde was 16 when the blockbuster hit “Royals” earned her acclaim as the voice of a generation. As her second album showed, that wasn’t quite accurate — she’s more like the voice of smart, self-conscious, neurotic people of all generations. “I think that you might be the same as me/Behave abnormally,” she sings on “Homemade Dynamite.” The sound is bigger-sounding and more club-friendly than the spare sound of her 2016 debut (especially on the single “Green Light”), and she’s even more impressive on a big stage.

459 Kid Cudi Man on the Moon: The End of the DaDream On, 2009 Kid Cudi helped Kanye West shape his introspective R&B/hip-hop hybrid 808s & Heartbreak. On his debut LP, the Cleveland rapper took that sound further and deeper, merging emo and psychedelic rock with hip-hop bombast. His introspect runs the gamut from the severe depression of “Day ‘n’ Nite” to the sweet contentment of “Pursuit of Happiness,” both of which became unlikely hits. A decade after Man on the Moon, every chart is dominated by Kudi’s sad children.

458 Jason Isbell Southeastern Southeastern, 2013

457 Sinéad O’Connor I Do Not Want What I Haven’t Got Ensign/Chrysalis, 1990“How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21?” the Irish art rocker asked on her breakthrough second album. Sinéad O’Connor struck a nerve with her keening voice, her shaved head, and her tortured grandiosity in “The Emperor’s New Clothes” and “I Am Stretched on Your Grave.” But she hit Number One with an obscure Prince breakup ballad, “Nothing Compares 2 U.” Originally just filler on a flop album by the Family, it became O’Connor’s signature song.

456 Al Green Greatest Hits Hi/EMI, 1975 “In Memphis, you just do as you feel,” Al Green told Rolling Stone in 1972. “It’s not a modern, up-to-par, very glamorous, big-red-chairs-and-carpet-that-thick studio. It’s one of those places you can go into and stomp out a good soul jam.” In collaboration with producer Willie Mitchell and musicians like drummer Al Jackson Jr., Green was a natural album artist, making love-and-pain classics such as 1973’s Call Me. But this collection makes for a unified album in itself, compiling hits like “Let’s Stay Together,” “I’m Still in Love With You,” and “Tired of Being Alone” into a flawless 10-song suite.

455 Bo Diddley Bo Diddley/Go Bo Diddley Chess, 1958

454 Can Ege Bamyasi United Artists, 1972

453 Nine Inch Nails Pretty Hate Machine TVT, 1989 “The music I always liked as a kid was stuff I could bum out to and realize, ‘Hey, someone else feels that way, too,'” Trent Reznor said in 1990. “So if someone can do that with my music, it’s mission accomplished.” Led by the hit “Head Like a Hole,” Nine Inch Nails’ debut album took bleak Midwestern goth-industrial disco to the rock masses, a move that would shape pop culture just as much as Nirvana’s Nevermind did. When Reznor sang, “Grey would be the color if I had a heart,” on “Something I Can Never Have,” millions felt his pain.

452 Diana Ross and the Supremes Anthology Tamla/Motown, 1974

451 Roberta Flack First Take Atlantic, 1969 At the peak of psychedelic soul music, Roberta Flack debuted with a classy quietude and thoughtful grace, recording with jazz musicians and complex horn and string arrangements. Her record was widely admired, but it didn’t become popular until three years later, after her pained version of Ewan MacColl’s 1950s folk ballad, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” scored a love scene in Clint Eastwood’s movie Play Misty for Me, and the song spent six weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

450 Paul and Linda McCartney Ram Apple, 1971

449 The White Stripes Elephant V2/XL/Third Man, 2003

448 Otis Redding Dictionary of Soul Volt, 1966

447 Bad Bunny X 100pre Rimas, 2018 Heralded by a subtly symbolic Christmas Eve release, Bad Bunny’s 2018 debut, X 100pre, was the Puerto Rican artist’s bid to court listeners new to Latin sounds, running through trap, reggaeton, dembow, synth-pop, and even pop punk, with help from Anglophonic ambassadors like Diplo and Drake. Bad Bunny could be shamelessly crude and totally vulnerable, with his slow-burning baritone opening the floor for Latin pop that’s not afraid to get uncomfortable.

446 Alice Coltrane Journey in Satchidanada Impulse!, 1971

445 Yes Close to the Edge Atlantic, 1972 Sessions for this album were so intense and taxing that monster drummer Bill Bruford quit the band when it was over due to stress. The hard work paid off. Close to the Edge is the best of Yes’ many lineups at an absolute peak, with Jon Anderson’s sun-king vocals pouring out over new member Rick Wakeman’s dazzling keyboards. The title track, an 18-minute epic in four distinct parts, remains the most majestic moment in the prog-rock history.

444 Fiona Apple Extraordinary Machine Epic, 2005 After cutting a pristine chamber-pop version of her third album with Jon Brion, her collaborator on 1999’s When the Pawn…, Apple’s label demanded revisions, so she redid almost the whole thing with Dr. Dre sideman Mike Elizondo and Beatles aficionado Brian Kehew. The changes and attendant delays spurred protests from fans, but the end result was hardly a compromise: Extraordinary Machine is a complex, versatile breakup record, with Apple playing McCartney-esque piano lines over skipping rhythms on melodically rich, lyrically thorny songs like “O’ Sailor” and “Better Version of Me.” You try squeezing the word “stentorian” into hooks you can belt at karaoke.

443 David Bowie Scary Monsters RCA, 1980

442 The Weeknd Beauty Behind the Madness XO, 2015 Abel Tesfaye lets you know who he is right out front, no metaphors, on the Kanye West co-produced track “Tell Your Friends”: His life is about “poppin’ pills, fuckin’ bitches, livin’ life so trill.” The Toronto R&B singer helped make pop music a darker place in the 2010s — “Bitch, I’m still a user,” he warns on his hugely successful second LP. His pristine, downy voice and spare, frosty electronic tracks suck you in, and Swedish pop genius Max Martin produces three tracks, including the bumping “Can’t Feel My Face,” a love song to cocaine as well as a massive pop hit.

441 Britney Spears Blackout Jive, 2007 The pop queen vents all her raging party-girl hostility in Blackout — the weirdest, wildest music of her life. Blackout is her avant-disco concept album about fame, scandal, divorce, and dancing on tables in a cloud of glitter and Cheetos dust. “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17,” Britney sneers in “Piece of Me,” with her voice warped into an electro-punk snarl. When she asks, “You want a piece of me?” she’s either pimping herself out or threatening to kick your ass. Either way, it’s Britney, bitch.

440 Loretta Lynn Coal Miner's Daughter Decca, 1971

439 James Brown Sex Machine King, 1970 Kicked off by its hypnotic 11-minute title track (a studio jam, to which Brown added fake crowd noise), Sex Machine signaled a new funk renaissance for Soul Brother Number One, thanks in part to the groovy skills of bassist Bootsy Collins and his guitarist brother Catfish, who had just joined the band. Pairing “Sex Machine” with a legit live set recorded by Brown’s previous ensemble (“It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” sounds devastating), the LP continued his legend as one of the all-time greatest live showmen.

438 Blur Parklife Food, 1994

437 Primal Scream Screamadelica Sire, 1991

436 2Pac All Eyez on Me Death Row, 1996 2Pac wanted it all: credibility and success, “murderous lyrics” and voice-of-a-generation gravitas. On his fourth (and final) album, he briefly gets it. In the course of 27 songs and two discs, Pac empties his brain of the contradictory impulses. The Dr. Dre track “California Love” became a huge house-party hit, but what unifies the album, through an array of different producers and guest stars, is Pac’s charisma and his struggles with morality: “It’s similar to Rhythm Nation, but thugged out — forgive me, Janet.”

435 Pet Shop Boys Actually EMI Manhattan,, 1987

434 Pavement Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain Matador, 1994 After the indie-rock slacker kings’ dazzling debut, Slanted and Enchanted, nobody knew what Pavement would try next for an encore. But Crooked Rain turned out to be their sunniest, most tuneful music — a concept album about turning 28, full of pastoral beauty and wiseass melody, with echoes of Creedence and Hendrix, maybe even the Dead. Stephen Malkmus’ breathy vocals and bittersweet guitar ripples in “Gold Soundz,” “Silence Kid,” and “Range Life” capture the moment of feeling stranded halfway to adulthood, so drunk in the August sun.

433 LCD Soundsystem Sound of Silver DFA/Capitol, 2007

432 Usher Confessions Arista, 2004 Usher was already a star in 2004, a sly singer and slick dancer whose R&B hits found a home with pop fans. But Confessions, which is one of the last 10-million-plus sellers ever made, turned him into an unstoppable juggernaut. Usher worked with a murderers’ row of R&B and hip-hop talent, from Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to Jermaine Dupri to Just Blaze; the album moves easily from club wreckers like the Lil Jon- and Ludacris-assisted smash “Yeah!” to forgive-me-for-cheating ballads to love-you-forever duets.

431 Los Lobos How Will the Wolf Survive? Slash/Warner Bros., 19

430 Elvis Costello My Aim Is True Columbia, 1977 Elvis Costello on the fuel for his debut: “I spent a lot of time with just a big jar of instant coffee and the first Clash album [see No. 102], listening to it over and over.” The music is more pub rock than punk rock, but the songs are full of punk’s verbal bite. The album’s opening lines — “Now that your picture’s in the paper being rhythmically admired” — and the poisoned-valentine ballad “Alison” established Costello as one of the sharpest, and nastiest, lyricists of his generation.

429 The Four Tops Reach Out Tamla/Motown, 1967 The Four Tops were the most dramatic of the Motown singing groups, driven by the towering vocals of Levi Stubbs. Reach Out has overwrought classics like the title track, the goth-soul tsunami “7 Rooms of Gloom,” and “Bernadette,” on which lust and paranoia spontaneously combust. They also branch out into rock and folk with covers of the Monkees and Tim Hardin. It was the last Motown album for the label’s definitive songwriting team Holland, Dozier, and Holland.

428 Hüsker Dü New Day Rising SST, 1985

427 Al Green Call Me Hi, 1973

426 Lucinda Williams Lucinda Williams Rough Trade, 1988 In 1988, this album didn’t make sense. It was twangy, but it wasn’t country. It rocked, but it wasn’t rock. It was blue, but wasn’t the blues. Williams hadn’t released an album in eight years, perhaps worn down by the lack of attention her music received. That began to change with this self-titled LP, recorded with a taut three-piece band. Her consistent theme is longing (“I Just Wanted to See You So Bad,” “Passionate Kisses”), but there’s also defiance and desperation in “Changed the Locks,” later covered by Tom Petty.

425 Paul Simon Paul Simon Columbia, 1972

424 Beck Odelay Geffen, 1996 Burrowing into the studio with the Dust Brothers, Beck came back with a Technicolor version of his Woody Guthrie-meets-Grandmaster Flash vision, demonstrating to all his rock peers on “Devil’s Haircut” and “Where It’s At” that turntables had a brighter future than refried grunge, while reminding listeners of the Sixties and his own folk roots with the shabby, lovely “Jack-Ass.” As he told Rolling Stone in 1997, “I’m a traditionalist in a lot of ways. A lot of what my generation is into, what it represents, I’m totally against.”

423 Yo La Tengo I Can Hear the Heart Beating As One Matador, 1997 In rock, as in life, breakups get all the attention; successful marriages tend to generate fewer headlines. But Yo La Tengo — the long-married couple of Georgia Hubley and Ira Kaplan, plus bassist James McNew — is a testament to figuring it out together. The band’s 1997 masterpiece is indie rock at its most joyfully exploratory, with deeply catchy fuzz-jams, some Casio-keyboard bossa nova, a cover of the Beach Boys’ “Little Honda, and “Autumn Sweater,” a stone-cold classic that turns organ, percussion, and shy murmuring into something mesmerizing and beautiful.

422 Marvin Gaye Let's Get It On Tamla/Motown, 1973

421 M.I.A. Arular Interscope, 2005

420 Earth, Wind and Fire That’s the Way of the World Columbia, 1975

419 Eric Church Chief EMI Nashville, 2011 Eric Church emerged in the mid-2000s as one of country music’s best new singer-songwriters, and his third album rolled all of his gifts into a tight package that was rock-influenced, rough around the edges, and catchy as hell. “Hungover & Hard Up” shows the North Carolina native’s abiding gift for drowning his sorrows in booze and melody, and on the classic “Springsteen,” he invokes Bruce’s music as a way to access the passion of youth. The songwriting is so confident, even the ballads swagger a bit.

418 Dire Straits Brothers in Arms Warner Bros., 1985

417 Ornette Coleman The Shape of Jazz to Come Atlantic, 1959

416 The Roots Things Fall Apart MCA, 1999 The Nineties’ alternative-rap scene hit its high-water mark as an album-length art form with this love letter to black music in the late 20th century. That theme is most explicit on on “Act Too (The Love of My Life),” a tender dedication to hip-hop’s redemptive power, but it’s also there in the playful way Black Thought and Malik B bounce rhymes off each other and in the beats that riff affectionately on everyone from Sly Stone to Schoolly D in a kaleidoscopic celebration of musical soul.

415 The Meters Looka Py Py Josie, 1969 The Meters were the house band for New Orleans’ genius producer Allen Toussaint and played on Seventies landmarks such as LaBelle’s Nightbirds, while also running off a series of their own rock-solid LPs. These instrumentals — sampled by rappers including Nas and Salt-N-Pepa — are funk of the gods; tight, cutting, but also relaxed and inviting, with Art Neville’s lyrical Hammond B3 organ adding chill texture to George Porter Jr.’s monster bass and the off-the-beat Second Line swing of drummer of Ziggy Modeliste.

414 Chic Risqué Atlantic, 1979

413 Creedence Clearwater Revival Cosmo's Factory Fantasy, 1970 Cosmo’s Factory was CCR’s third classic album in under a year. John Fogerty began it with the seven-minute power-choogle “Ramble Tamble,” raging against “actors in the White House.” The hits include the country travelogue “Lookin’ Out My Back Door,” the Vietnam nightmare “Run Through the Jungle,” the Little Richard tribute “Travelin’ Band,” and the Stax-style ballad “Long as I Can See the Light.” But the triumph is CCR’s 11-minute cowbell-crazed jam on “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” proof these guys could mix hippie visions with populist grit.

412 Smokey Robinson and the MiraGoing to a Go Go Tamla/Motown, 1965

411 Bob Dylan Love and Theft Columbia, 2001 The blood and glory of 1997’s Time Out of Mind had raised the bar: This was the first Dylan album in years that had to live up to fans’ expectations. He didn’t just exceed them — he blew them up. Dylan sang in the voice of a grizzled drifter who’d visited every nook and cranny of America and gotten chased out of them all. Love and Theft was full of corny vaudeville jokes and apocalyptic floods, from the guitar rave “Summer Days” to the country lilt of “Po’ Boy.”

410 The Beach Boys Wild Honey Capitol, 1967 After Pet Sounds and the aborted Smiley Smile, what was left for the Beach Boys to do? Invent the idea of DIY pop. Ditching the opulent and intricate arrangements of those two albums, Wild Honey returned them to their days as a spunky, self-contained band. In 24 concise but utterly winning minutes, they romp through set of low-fi sunbaked melodies and R&B and soul homages — all suffused with warmth, sly hooks, and a sense of band unity, even as a frazzled Brian Wilson was starting to pull back.

409 Grateful Dead Workingman’s Dead Warner Bros., 1970

408 Motörhead Ace of Spades Bronze, 1980

407 Neil Young Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere Reprise, 1969 Neil Young and Crazy Horse hadn’t been together for more than eight weeks when they cut this album. It’s down-home hippie-grunge with the feel of a jam session conducted by master jammers. Both sides of the album end in monster, 10-minute guitar excursions, especially “Down by the River” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” and “Cinnamon Girl” was Young’s first big solo single, three minutes of crunching distortion featuring a one-note guitar solo for the ages — “the closest thing Crazy Horse had to a hit,” Young said.

406 Magnetic Fields 69 Love Songs Merge, 1999 “It started with the title,” Stephin Merritt said of 69 Love Songs, which he imagined in the Sinatra-era tradition of “theme” albums. A tour de force of pop mastery, his three-disc splurge had everything from lounge jazz to Podunk country to punk parody, peaking with sidelong standards like “Papa Was a Rodeo” and “The Luckiest Guy on the Lower East Side.” God-level moment: “The Death of Ferdinand de Saussure,” which is titled after a French linguist and rhymes his name with closure, bulldozer, and classic Motown songwriting team Holland-Dozier-Holland, hooking it all to an unforgettable tune.

405 Various Nuggets: Original Artyfacts from the FElektra, 1972 This collection of Sixties garage rock, compiled by rock critic and soon-to-be Patti Smith guitarist Lenny Kaye, became a touchstone for Seventies punks and, years later, for the aftershock of post-punk. The 27-track, two-LP set was a radical idea in 1972: While rock was getting bigger, Nuggets established a new canon out of forgotten AM-radio hits — brutally simple singles like the Standells’ “Dirty Water,” the Shadows of Knight’s “Oh Yeah!” and the Count Five’s “Psychotic Reaction.” Rhino expanded Nuggets into a sprawling four-CD box in 1998.

404 Anita Baker Rapture Elektra, 1986

403 Ghostface Killah Supreme Clientele Epic, 2000

402 Fela Kuti and Africa 70 Expensive Shit Sounds Workshop, 197The title track is a 13-minute odyssey that epitomizes Nigerian funk king Fela Kuti’s knack for channeling fearless social commentary into body-moving grooves; the Africa 70 horns blare out infectious riffs as peerless drummer Tony Allen keeps up an indefatigable shuffling pulse, while Fela calls out the “fools” who would “use your shit to put you for jail.” Side Two’s “Water No Get Enemy” slows things down to a celebratory strut, concluding a short-yet-sweet effort that plays like a primer on the joys of Afrobeat.

401 Blondie Blondie Private Stock, 1977 “We’re gonna shoot the tube!” Debbie Harry promises on “In the Sun,” hanging 10 on the Bowery. Blondie had a hard time getting taken seriously in the CBGB punk scene. But while the band’s debut celebrates Sixties rock & roll at its campiest — girl groups, garage trash, surf bubblegum — Harry’s heart-on-sleeve swoon during “In the Flesh “ sincerely updated the Shangri-Las for the Lower East Side circa 1977, and the gritty “Rip Her to Shreds” showed Blondie could get down with the tough guys, too.

400 The Go-Go’s Beauty and the Beat I.R.S., 1981 The most popular girl group of New Wave surfed to the top of the charts with this hooky debut. Everyone knows “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips Our Sealed,” exuberant songs that livened up the Top 40, but the entire album welds punkish spirit to party-minded pop. It’s one of those albums where every song feels like it could’ve been a single — from “This Town,” a sweet, tough celebration of their L.A. scene, to the haunting “Lust to Love” to the album-ending one-two punch of “Skidmarks on My Heart” and “Can’t Stop the World.”

399 Brian Wilson Smile Nonesuch, 2004 This album lived in myth for decades. Brian Wilson’s unfinished response to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club took nearly 40 years to finally come to fruition. Longtime Wilson collaborator Van Dyke Parks helped him realize his vision, with lush string arrangements, sublime melodies, and vocal harmonies, all impeccably constructed. Close your eyes and you can imagine how it might’ve changed the world in 1968, but with Wilson’s influence still all over scads of indie bands in 2004, it sounds and feels majestically modern.

398 The Raincoats The Raincoats Rough Trade, 1979 The Raincoats came up with one of the most experimental and thrilling sounds to emerge from the London punk explosion — four women making their own gloriously unkempt racket. As guitarist Ana Da Silva explained, “We rehearsed for hours, but we always fell apart.” Da Silva and Gina Birch chant over Palmolive’s manic drums and Vicky Aspinall’s buzz-saw violin, for gems like “In Love” and their gender-twisted cover of the Kinks’ “Lola.” Their debut album finally got its long-overdue U.S. release in 1993, at the insistence of Raincoats superfan Kurt Cobain.

397 Billie Eilish When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do Interscope, 2019 Billie Eilish became a teen folk hero with her blockbuster debut — just your average 17-year-old songwriting prodigy with a head full of nightmares. Eilish wrote and recorded these tunes with her brother, Finneas, at the L.A. house where they grew up. But her adolescent imagination ran wild, from the gothic angst of “Bury a Friend” to the whispery trap-pop strut of “Bad Guy.” The voice of a new generation? Duh.

396 Todd Rundgren Something/Anything? Bearsville, 1972 “I’m probably the whitest singer in the world,” Todd Rundgren told Rolling Stone in 1972. “I have no ‘soul’ in the usual sense — but I can do this great feminine falsetto.” On this tour de force double album, Rundgren employs that falsetto on two great singles (“I Saw the Light” and “Hello It’s Me”). For the rest of the album, he demonstrates his complete command of the studio, playing almost all the instruments himself, experimenting with a kaleidoscope of rock genres, and even delivering a monologue on what poorly made records sound like.

395 D’Angelo and the Vanguard Black Messiah RCA, 2014

394 Diana Ross Diana Motown, 1980 By 1980, Diana Ross’ tenure with the Supremes had ended a decade earlier, and she had spent the Seventies basking in the glow of her successful film career and soundtrack hits. But she still wanted to shake things up. Her 10th album, Diana, was a Nile Rogers-assisted disco jaunt at a time when disco backlash was running rampant; featuring classics like “Upside Down” and “I’m Coming Out,” it became her biggest and most acclaimed album to date.

393 Taylor Swift 1989 Big Machine, 2014 Swift set out to make “blatant pop music” on 1989 and came up with a love letter to the Pet Shop Boys and Eurythmics, all glossy synths, icy snares, and the manic rush of “Blank Space” and “Bad Blood.” She ends the album with the electro-chill of “Clean,” one of her starkest, grandest romantic exorcisms, comparing love’s memory to “a wine-stained dress I can’t wear anymore” and unspooling images of drowning and surviving that can bring to mind another Eighties hero, Kate Bush.

392 Ike and Tina Turner Proud Mary: The Best of Ike and TinaEMI, 1991

391 Kelis Kaleidoscope Virgin, 1999

390 Pixies Surfer Rosa 4AD, 1988

389 Mariah Carey The Emancipation of Mimi Island, 2005

388 Aretha Franklin Young, Gifted and Black Atlantic, 1972 Aretha Franklin was 29 at the time of Young, Gifted and Black, and she was already on her 19th album and her second record label. With her gospel-choir training and jazz chops, there was nothing she didn’t know about singing. Franklin covers (and vivifies) Paul McCartney and Elton John, not to mention Nina Simone’s title song, an anthem of the civil rights movement, and she sings the self-written hits (“Day Dreaming,” “Rock Steady”) with calm certainty, guided only by the spirit.

387 Radiohead In Rainbows XL, 2007 Radiohead released In Rainbows as a surprise download in the fall of 2007, letting fans pay whatever they liked. But the real surprise was how expansive the music turned out to be, with material the band had road-tested live in the U.S. all summer. Thom Yorke gets soulful in the intense love songs “All I Need,” “House of Cards,” and “Nude.” It’s Radiohead’s warmest album, with the vibe of a communal jam session. One that’s taking place at the end of the world, of course.

386 J Dilla Donuts Stones Throw, 2006 Questlove of the Roots called the Detroit producer “the music god that music gods and music experts and music lovers worship.” During the Nineties and early ’00s, Dilla worked with a who’s who of hip-hop greats and helped shape the sound of albums like D’Angelo’s Voodoo [see No. 28]. Released three days before his death, Donuts is a beat head’s delight: 31 concise, wildly inventive sample-swirls (love the Frank Zappa bit on “Mash”), many of which would end up being sampled themselves in the years that followed.

385 Ramones Rocket to Russia Sire, 1977 The Ramones wrote their third album on tour, as they took the gospel of three chords and ripped denim beyond New York’s five boroughs. Rocket to Russia was also their first true studio triumph: an exuberant, polished bottling of the CBGB-stage napalm of Ramones and Leave Home. The razor-slashing hooks bring out the Top 40 classicism in “Rockaway Beach” and “Sheena Is a Punk Rocker,” plus the lonely-boy poignancy of Joey Ramone’s vocals in “I Don’t Care” and “I Wanna Be Well.”

384 The Kinks The Kinks Are the Village Green Pres Reprise, 1969

383 Massive Attack Mezzanine Circa/Virgin, 1998 The Bristol, England, collective that invented trip-hop — Daddy G, Mushroom, and 3D — got even heavier on Mezzanine. They turn the Cocteau Twins’ Elisabeth Fraser into a soul diva in “Teardrop,” and “Angel” is a six-minute ride into the abyss, with the legendary reggae singer Horace Andy wailing over levee-busting drums, cinematic strings, and blasts of guitar. “We like reclaiming the guitar,” Daddy G told Rolling Stone. “People say black music shouldn’t have heavy guitar, but who invented all that heavy-guitar shit? Jimi Hendrix!”

382 Tame Impala Currents Interscope, 2015

381 Lynyrd Skynyrd (Pronounced 'Lĕh-'nérd 'Skin-'nérd) MCA, 1973 Southern-rock icons Lynyrd Skynyrd took their name from their high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, who tried to make them cut their hair. (He later became a fan.) Skynyrd lived fast, played hard, and went down in a tragic 1977 plane crash. On their debut, Ronnie Van Zant flexes his wiseass drawl in “Gimme Three Steps,” protests racism in “Things Goin’ On,” and honors his mama in “Simple Man.” But the peak is “Free Bird,” nine minutes of dueling guitars from Allen Collins and Gary Rossington — now and forever, the ultimate air-guitar epic.

380 Charles Mingus Mingus Ah Um Columbia, 1959

379 Rush Moving Pictures Anthem, 1981 On Seventies albums like 2112 and Hemispheres, Rush mastered the high-prog epic. Moving Pictures was the record where they proved they could say as much in four minutes as they previously had in 20. Songs like “Tom Sawyer,” “Limelight,” and the Police-like “Vital Signs” showcased the trio’s superhuman chops in a radio-ready framework, while more adventurous tracks like the Morse code–inspired instrumental “YYZ” and the synth-heavy suite “The Camera Eye” found them tastefully streamlining their wildest ideas. Said Geddy Lee, “We learned it’s not so easy to write something simple.”

378 Run-DMC Run-D.M.C. Profile, 1983

377 Yeah Yeah Yeahs Fever to Tell Interscope, 2003 These New York art-punk brats blew away the doldrums of the early 2000s with a true rock & roll goddess in Karen O. She knew how to work her sneer like a pair of ripped fishnets, trashing any room in sight. Yet the tender ballad “Maps” became a surprise hit, with Karen pleading “Wait, they don’t love you like I love you” over Nick Zinner’s warped guitar fuzz and Brian Chase’s drum thunder. “There’s a lot of loooove in that song,” she said. “But there’s a lot of fear, too.”

376 Neutral Milk Hotel In the Aeroplane Over the Sea Merge, 1998 The Louisiana band nearly pulled off an indie-rock Pet Sounds with their second album, leavening low-fi guitar racket and twee folk with circus-y instruments like the singing saw and zanzithophone, as leader Jeff Magnum cut through the irony of the Seinfeld/Pavement era with his heraldic surrealist yammerings about broken homes, Anne Frank, religion, scary sexual awakenings, and other coming-of-age traumas. It’s weird, raw, harrowing stuff; if you think you can’t be moved by a song called “The King of Carrot Flowers Pts. 2 & 3,” hearing is believing.

375 Green Day Dookie Reprise, 1994

374 Robert Johnson King of the Delta Blues Singers Columbia, 1961 “You want to know how real the blues can get?” Keith Richards asked. “Well, this is it.” The bluesman in question was Robert Johnson, who lived from 1911 to 1938 in the Mississippi Delta, and whose guitar prowess was so great, it inspired stories he had sold his soul to the devil. This 1961 reissue of Johnson’s original 78s was a life-changer for Sixties rockers like Richards and Eric Clapton; the moaning lust of “Terraplane Blues” and the haunted desperation of “Hellhound on My Trail” haven’t aged a minute.

373 Isaac Hayes Hot Buttered Soul Enterprise, 1969 Isaac Hayes demanded Stax Records give him complete artistic control for his second album. What happened next sounded like nothing else in music at the time, an orchestral-soul watershed that forecast R&B’s turn toward symphonic excess and plush introspect. Hayes’ 12-minute Southern-psychedelic version of the Burt Bacharach/Hal David “Walk On By” and his spectacularly tortured 18-minute take on Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix” took easy-listening tunes and refashioned them in his own radically laid-back image.

372 Big Brother and the Holding Cheap Thrills Columbia, 1968

371 The Temptations Anthology Tamla/Motown, 1973

370 Lil Wayne Tha Carter II Cash Money/Universal,On Tha Carter II, Lil Wayne anointed himself the “best rapper alive,” and drove himself insane trying to make good on his declaration. He demolishes the same beat three ways (“Fly In,” “Carter II,” “Fly Out”), like a Michelin-starred chef using every part of the animal, and drops 106 & Park jams (“Fireman,” “Shooter”) with ease. “I deserve the throne,” he raps on “Hustler Musik.” “And if the kid ain’t right, then let me die on this song.” Two years later, Wayne was alive and well, and the throne was firmly secured.

369 Mobb Deep The Infamous Loud, 1995 “We were just straight hood,” Havoc said. “It wasn’t no pretty boy shit. He was talking about the Timberlands and bandanas he and Prodigy (R.I.P.) wore, but that was also the brutal appeal of their second album, which the duo produced mostly by themselves. Q Tip functioned as an executive producer, adding depth to sinister tracks built off of 1970s samples, many of them from the LP collection that Prodigy’s jazz-musician grandfather left to him. “Shook Ones Pt. II,” a minor hit, and “Survival of the Fittest” have only one impetus, to document life in a Queens project.

368 George Harrison All Things Must Pass Apple, 1970

367 Drake If You're Reading This It's Too Late Cash Money, 2015 Just when everyone was ready for more pop sensitivity from Drake, he went street. If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late was a mixtape for his rap base — no radio hits or catchy hooks, just his harshest beats and rhymes. It sums up Drake’s willingness to switch lanes at any moment. (Just a few months later, he swerved back into soft-soul territory on “Hotline Bling.”) He spends his money and curses his enemies in paranoid bangers like “10 Bands.”

366 Aerosmith Rocks Columbia, 1976

365 Madvillain Madvillainy Stones Throw, 2004

364 Talking Heads More Songs About Buildings and Foo Sire, 1978

363 Parliament The Mothership Connection Casablanca, 1975 George Clinton leads his Detroit crew of “extraterrestrial brothers” through a visionary album of science-fiction funk on jams like “Supergroovalisticprosifunkstication” and “Give Up the Funk (Tear the Roof Off the Sucker).” It’s a concept album inspired by Star Trek and 2001: A Space Odyssey, with Clinton as an outer-space radio DJ, broadcasting uncut funk from “the Chocolate Milky Way” and telling the people of Earth, “Put a glide in your stride and a dip in your hip, and come on up to the Mothership.”

362 Luther Vandross Never Too Much Epic, 1981

361 My Chemical Romance The Black Parade Reprise, 2006

360 Funkadelic One Nation Under a Groove Warner Bros., 1978 George Clinton led two of the 1970s’ wildest bands: Funkadelic for rock guitars, Parliament for dance beats. But this album sums up his whole P-Funk empire, as Clinton spreads the gospel of mind-altering, loose-booty rhythms for the body and brain. “One Nation Under a Groove” is a call to arms, demanding “the funk, the whole funk, and nothing but the funk.” Another song asks, “Who Says a Funk Band Can’t Play Rock?!” It’s the same message Uncle Jam has always preached: Free your mind and your ass will follow.

359 Big Star Radio City Ardent, 1974 Alex Chilton and his band of Memphis misfits were years ahead of their time — when they released Radio City in 1974, hardly anyone heard it. But like the Velvet Underground, they became hugely influential when future generations discovered them and got their minds blown. Big Star came up with their own skewed pop sound, filtering their love of the Beatles through their Memphis-soul roots. “September Gurls” and “Life Is White” should have been hits, soaring with the sweetly eccentric guitar chime and the romantic ache in Chilton’s voice.

358 Sonic Youth Goo Geffen, 1990

357 Tom Waits Rain Dogs Island, 1985

356 Dr. John Gris-Gris Atco, 1968

355 Black Sabbath Black Sabbath Warner Bros., 1970 Recorded in a single 12-hour blurt by a hippie-leaning former blues band, this lumbering debut conjures up a new, sludgy sound: the birth pains of heavy metal. The slide guitar on “Wizard” and the grungy boogie of “Wicked World” would influence not only future metal spawn but even the sound of Nirvana. The album’s most vivid nightmare is the six-minute “Black Sabbath,” which even scared the band itself. “We always wanted to go heavier than any other band,” said bassist Geezer Butler.

354 X-Ray Spex Germfree Adolescents EMI, 1978

353 The Cars The Cars Elektra, 1978 “We used to joke that the first album should be called The Cars’ Greatest Hits,” said guitarist Elliot Easton. Their debut was arty and punchy enough to be part of Boston’s New Wave scene, and yet so catchy that nearly every track (“My Best Friend’s Girl,” “Just What I Needed”) landed on the radio. When Ric Ocasek died in 2019, Eason offered a fitting tribute: “If the goal was to have great success making pop music with a sense of irony, then mission accomplished, right?”

352 Eminem The Slim Shady LP Interscope, 1999

351 Roxy Music For Your Pleasure Warner Bros., 1973

350 Stevie Wonder Music of My Mind Tamla/Motown, 1972

349 MC5 Kick Out the Jams Elektra, 1969 It’s the ultimate rock salute: “Kick out the jams, motherfuckers!” Recorded live in Detroit by Rob Tyner and his anarchist crew, Kick Out the Jams writhes and screams with the belief that rock & roll is a necessary act of civil disobedience. The proof: It was banned by a Michigan department store. The MC5 proved their lefty credentials the summer before the album was recorded when they were the only band that showed up to play for the Yippies protesting the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago.

348 Gillian Welch Time (The Revelator) Acony, 2001 Gillian Welch had a breakout moment when she appeared in the Coen brothers’ folk-music-themed movie O Brother, Where Art Thou?. She followed it with this striking modern-roots album, collaborating with guitarist David Rawlings on songs about love, sex, nostalgia, and the music of Elvis Presley. It ends with the 15-minute meditation “I Dream a Highway,” which the pair had never played before they recorded it, one example of the spontaneous power of an LP that made Depression-era music feel time-warped into the present.

347 GZA Liquid Swords Geffen, 1995

346 Arctic Monkeys AM Domino, 2013 Not many Brit-pop bands come up with strong second acts like this. The Arctic Monkeys debuted with the stun-gun pop punk of 2005’s Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not. But by 2013, they’d moved to L.A. and, on AM, hit a sound that frontman Alex Turner likened to “the Spiders From Mars covering Aaliyah.” The results were not unlike David Bowie’s transformation on Station to Station — alluringly spooky, full of distressed falsetto soul, noir guitars, and rife with bar scenes that look like crime scenes with dead-end hookups.

345 Bruce Springsteen The Wild, the Innocent & the E StreetColumbia, 1973 Reeling from the commercial fizzle of his debut LP, Bruce Springsteen threw off the “new Dylan” baggage and applied his Jersey-bar-band skills to some of the funniest tunes he’d ever write: “Rosalita,” “Kitty’s Back,” and the boardwalk love song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy).” The music is loose, jazzy, and full of ambition — a studio take on the live muscle that Springsteen was already famous for — and “New York City Serenade” is the first of Springsteen’s epic street operas.

344 Toots and the Maytals Funky Kingston Island, 1973

343 Sly and the Family Stone Greatest Hits Epic, 1970

342 The Beatles Let It Be Apple, 1970 Let It Be is the sound of the world’s biggest pop group at war with itself. John Lennon is at his most acidic; George Harrison’s “I Me Mine” is about the sin of pride. Only Paul McCartney sounds focused, as if the title song were his personal survival mantra. The original concept was a live-in-the-studio album and film, begun in January 1969, that left the Beatles so weary that they abandoned the project to make Abbey Road. Phil Spector went back to the tapes later, sweetening ballads like “Across the Universe” and “The Long and Winding Road.”

341 The Smashing Pumpkins Siamese Dream Virgin, 1993 “All these alternative bands today are so high up on their punk-rock horse that they’re in denial about being huge and playing big shows,” Billy Corgan told Rolling Stone in 1994. “Not only do we respect the clichés, we see the truth in them.” On their second disc, the Pumpkins pushed further from Nineties alt-rock to a grander, orchestrated sound with multiple guitar parts, strings, and a Mellotron. Alt-rock ended up following the band on its trip: Siamese Dream is packed with hits (“Cherub Rock,” “Today”).

340 Snoop Doggy Dogg Doggystyle Death Row/Interscope,

339 Janet Jackson Rhythm Nation 1814 A&M, 1989 Janet Jackson bought a military suit and ruled the radio for two years with this album. Along with producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, she fashioned a grand pop statement with hip-hop funk (“Rhythm Nation”), slow jams (“Love Will Never Do [Without You]”), and even hair metal (“Black Cat”). “While writing ‘Rhythm Nation’ I was kidding around, saying, ‘God, you guys, I feel like this could be the national anthem for the Nineties,’” Jackson recalled. “Just by a crazy chance we decided to look up when Francis Scott Key wrote the national anthem, and it was September 14th, 1814.”

338 Brian Eno Another Green World Island, 19755

337 Bob Dylan John Wesley Harding Columbia, 1967 Recovering from his 1966 motorcycle crash, Bob Dylan made a left turn into country fables and stark mystic folkways. He took a quick trip to Nashville and banged out John Wesley Harding. It’s his most ominous album, with characters from the Bible and the shadowy side of American history, from “I Am a Lonesome Hobo” to “All Along the Watchtower.” With his stripped-down sound and a black-and-white cover photo, Dyl

1
51 Chuck Berry The Great Twenty-Eight Chess, 1982 In the latter half of the Fifties, Chuck Berry released a string of singles that defined the sound and spirit of rock & roll. “Maybellene,” a fast, countryish rocker about a race between a Ford and a Cadillac, kicked it all off in 1955, and one classic hit followed another, each powered by Berry’s staccato, country-blues-guitar gunfire: “Roll Over Beethoven,” “School Day,” “Rock & Roll Music,” “Sweet Little Sixteen,” “Johnny B. Goode,” “Back in the U.S.A.” What was Berry’s secret? In the maestro’s own words: “The nature and backbone of my beat is boogie, and the muscle of my music is melodies that are simple.” This collection culls the best of that magic from 1955 to 1965.

50 Jay-Z The Blueprint Roc-A-Fella, 2001 With The Blueprint, Jay-Z took on anyone and everyone who wanted to sit on his throne, even the jesters. “Takeover,” one of rap’s most precise and unrelenting diss tracks, commits GBH on rappers Nas and Prodigy from Mobb Deep. When Hova isn’t taking shots at record executives, cops, critics, haters, biters, and his absent dad (and still, sadly, using the word “faggot”), he inches toward vulnerability on “Song Cry.” “Izzo (H.O.V.A.),” with dynamic production by Kanye West, gave him his first Top 10 single. Jay-Z elevates clever rhymes and innovations with an unmatched air of calm control and a cavalier confidence. Here’s the moral of the story, courtesy of “Takeover”: “You guys don’t want it with HOV.”

49 OutKast Aquemini LaFace, 1998 The title of OutKast’s third album is a made-up word that combines the star signs of Big Boi (Aquarius) and André 3000 (Gemini). Their music is about duality too, matching Big Boi’s imperative to “make the club get crunk” with André’s determination to “activate the left and right brain.” André was the virtuoso, clipping off compound rhymes with grace, while Big Boi’s more grounded flow and clear diction rooted their songs. Hits like “Rosa Parks” put the duo’s hometown “Hotlanta” on the rap map, and at a time when formulaic albums by Master P and Puff Daddy topped the charts, OutKast unleashed an explosive sound that used live musicianship, social commentary, and a heavy dose of deep funk to create the greatest record ever to come out of the Dirty South.

48 Bob Marley and the Wailers Legend Island, 1984 Bob Marley said, “Reggae music too simple for [American musicians]. You must be inside of it, know what’s happening, and why you want to play this music. You don’t just run to play this music because you
think you can make a million off it.” Ironically, this set of the late reggae idol’s greatest hits has sold in the millions. On a single disc, it captures everything that made him an international icon: his nuanced
songcraft, his political message, and — of course — the universal soul he brought to Jamaican rhythm and Rastafarian spirituality in the gunfighter ballad “I Shot the Sheriff,” the comforting swing of “No
47 Ramones Ramones Sire, 1976 “Our early
Woman, Nosongs came
Cry,” and out
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promise of alienation,
of “Redemption Song.” isolation, frustration — the feelings everybody feels between 17 and 75,” said singer Joey Ramone. Clocking in at just 29 minutes, Ramones is a complete rejection of the spangled artifice of 1970s rock. The songs were fast and anti-social, just like the band: “Beat on the Brat,” “Blitzkrieg Bop,” “Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue.” Guitarist Johnny Ramone refused to play solos — his jackhammer chords became the lingua franca of punk — and the whole record cost just more than $600 to make. But Joey’s leather-tender plea “I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend” showed that even punks need love.
46 Paul Simon Graceland Columbia, 1986 Frustrated by the experience of writing good songs that didn’t come to life in the studio, Paul Simon set out “to make really good tracks,” as he later put it. “I thought, ‘I have enough songwriting technique that
I can reverse this process and write this song after the tracks are made.’” Simon risked severe criticism by going to South Africa (then under apartheid) and working with the best musicians from the black
townships. With the fluid energy and expertise of guitarist Ray Phiri and the vocal troupe Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Simon created an album about isolation and redemption that transcended world music to
45 Prince Sign O' the Times Paisley Park/Warner Br He’d
becomefired hiswhole
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latest movie, Under the Cherry Moon, had flopped; just three years after Purple Rain, Prince was in the market for a comeback. So he recorded one of the great albums of the
Eighties. Times is best known for the apocalyptic title track, the brontosaurus funk of “Housequake,” and the gorgeous “If I Was Your Girlfriend.” Yet the simplest moments are unforgettable: the “Sweet Jane”-
style guitar plea of “The Cross,” the Stax revamp on “Slow Love,” a jilted girl’s sadness in “I Could Never Take the Place of Your Man.” “I hate the word ‘experiment,’” Prince said. “It sounds like something you
44 Nas Illmatic Columbia, 1994 Other rappers
didn’t were he
finish.” Here, harder and brasher, but nobody captured the creeping menace of life on the streets like this 20-year-old from New York’s Queensbridge projects. With lines like “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” Nas showed more poetic style than any MC since Rakim. His debut begins with the sound of a subway train, and for the next 39 minutes, he seems to visit every street corner from Queens to Brooklyn, detailing drug deals, escapism, persecution, prison life, and survival. Throughout, he displays a pure focus (there’s only one guest verse) and explosive dexterity; it’s one thing to say “I drop the ancient manifested hip-hop,” as he does in the first verse of “Memory Lane,” it’s another to back that up with a stunning, acrobatic second verse. Illmatic was an instant classic that never crossed over, which only deepened its myth with hip-hop heads.
finished.
43 A Tribe Called Quest The Low End Theory Jive, 1991 “We wanted the longevity of Earth, Wind, and Fire, and Prince, and people of that nature,” Phife Dawg told Rolling Stone. “We wanted to be known for full-length albums.” Other people connected the dots
between hip-hop and jazz , but A Tribe Called Quest’s second album drew the entire picture. The sound is dominated by the low end of the title — they even recruited legendary jazz bassist Ron Carter (who’d
worked with Thelonious Monk and Miles Davis). As Carter gets dope on the double bass, the Tribe discourse on matters ranging from the music industry (“Show Business”) to sexual politics (“The Infamous Date
42 Radiohead OK Computer Capitol, 1997 Radiohead
Rape”). recorded
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just while she was filming Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. OK is where the band began pulling at its sound like taffy, seeing what happened, not worrying if it was still “rock.” What resulted is a slow, haunting album with unforgettable tracks such as “Karma Police.” Guitarist Jonny Greenwood said, “I got very excited at the prospect of doing string parts that didn’t sound like ‘Eleanor Rigby,’ which is what all string parts have sounded like for the past 30 years.… We used violins to make frightening white-noise stuff, like the last chord of ‘Climbing Up the Walls.’”
gets deeper.
41 The Rolling Stones Let It Bleed ABKCO, 1969 The record kicks off with the terrifying “Gimme Shelter,” the song that came to symbolize not only the catastrophe of the Stones’ free show at Altamont but also the death of the utopian spirit of the 1960s. And the entire album burns with apocalyptic cohesion: the sex-mad desperation of “Live With Me”; the murderous blues of “Midnight Rambler”; Keith Richards’ lethal, biting guitar on “Monkey Man”; the epic moralism, with honky-tonk piano and massed vocal chorus, of “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which Mick Jagger wrote on acoustic guitar in his bedroom. “Somebody said that we could get the London Bach Choir,” Jagger recalled, “and we said, ‘That will be a laugh.'”

40 David Bowie The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust RCA, 1972 This album documents one of the most elaborate self-mythologizing schemes in rock, as David Bowie created the glittery, messianic alter ego Ziggy Stardust (“well-hung and snow-white tan”). The glam rock
Bowie made with guitarist Mick Ronson is an irresistible blend of sexy, campy pop and blues power, with enduring tracks like “Hang On to Yourself” and “Suffragette City.” The anthem “Ziggy Stardust” was one
of rock’s earliest, and best, power ballads. “I consider myself responsible for a whole new school of pretensions,” Bowie said. “They know who they are. Don’t you, Elton? Just kidding. No, I’m not.”
39 Talking Heads Remain in Light Sire, 1980 David Byrne said Remain in Light “was done in bits and pieces, one instrument at a time.” The result was a New Wave masterpiece powered by Byrne’s revelation, as he put it on “The Great Curve,” that “the
world moves on a woman’s hips.” It combined thrust of a P-Funk dance party, the ancient-to-the-future rhythm hypnosis of Nigerian funkmaster Fela Kuti, and the studied adventurousness of the album’s
producer and Heads co-conspirator, Brian Eno. Remain in Light marked Talking Heads’ transformation from avatars of the punk avant-garde to polyrhythmic magicians with hit-single appeal. Just try not dancing
38 Bob Dylan Blonde on Blonde Columbia, 1966 Rock’s
to first
“Once instudio double LP by a major artist was, as Bob Dylan declared in 1978, “the closest I ever got to the sound I hear in my head … that thin, that wild-mercury sound.” Blonde on Blonde was mainly recorded in Nashville with session pros (another rock first), who created an almost contradictory magni ficence: a tightly wound tension around Dylan’s quicksilver language and incisive singing in barrelhouse surrealism such as “Rainy Day Women #12 and 35” and “Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again.” Amid the frenzy, Dylan delivered some of his finest, clearest songs of comfort and desire: the sidelong beauty “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and “I Want You,” the title of which Dylan almost used for the album.
a Lifetime.”
37 Dr. Dre The Chronic Deathrow, 1992 When George Clinton first heard hip-hop artists blending old records with new beats, he wasn’t too impressed. But then Dr. Dre turned samples of Clinton’s P-Funk sides into G-Funk, and Dr. Funkenstein
approved, calling funk “the DNA of hip-hop and rap.” Dre had already taken gangsta rap to the mainstream with his earlier group, N.W.A, but on The Chronic, he funked up the rhymes with a smooth bass-heavy
production style and the laid-back delivery of then-unknown rapper Snoop Doggy Dogg. When Dre and Snoop dropped “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang,” there was no getting out of the way.
36 Michael Jackson Off the Wall Epic, 1979 “The ballads were what made Off the Wall a Michael Jackson album,” Jackson remembered of his big solo splash, which spun off four Top 10 hits and eclipsed the success of the Jackson 5. “I’d done ballads with [my] brothers, but they had never been too enthusiastic about them and did them more as a concession to me than anything else.” At the end of “She’s Out of My Life,” you can hear Jackson actually break down and cry in the studio. But the unstoppable dance tracks on Off the Wall remain classic examples of Jackson as a one-man disco inferno. “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough,” “Rock With You,” and “Burn This Disco Out” still get the party started today.

35 The Beatles Rubber Soul Parlophone, 1965 Producer George Martin described Rubber Soul as “the first album to present a new, growing Beatles to the world,” and so it was. The first of what was to be a series of huge leaps forward with each new album,
Rubber Soul opens with the comic character study “Drive My Car” and is suffused with Bob Dylan’s influence on “I’m Looking Through You,” “You Won’t See Me,” and “Norwegian Wood,” in which John Lennon
sings about sex with a humor and candor unlike any rock & roller before and George Harrison lays down rock’s first sitar solo. Harrison called Rubber Soul “the best one we made,” because “we were suddenly
34 Stevie Wonder Innervisions Tamla/Motown, 1973 “We as asounds
hearing people arewe
that not interested
weren’t able in
to ‘baby, baby’ songs any more, there’s more to life than that,” Stevie Wonder said in 1972. With Innervisions, Wonder offered a landmark fusion of social realism and spiritual idealism; he brings expressive color and irresistible funk to his synth-based keyboards on “Too High” (a cautionary anti-drug song) and “Higher Ground” (which echoes Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of transcendence). The album’s centerpiece is “Living for the City,” a cinematic depiction of exploitation and injustice. “Innervisions gives my own perspective on what’s happening in my world,” Wonder said. “I think it is my most personal album. I don’t care if it sells only five copies.”
hear before.”
33 Amy Winehouse Back to Black Island, 2006 With her love of Sixties girl-group pop and her dark beehive, Amy Winehouse came across as a star from another time. But as a child of the Nineties, she also loved hip-hop and wrote openly about her splattered relationships and issues with drugs and alcohol. Her breakthrough second album (recorded in Brooklyn with co-producers Mark Ronson and Salaam Remi) marked the arrival of a resplendently damaged 21st-century torch singer. Tracks like the mildly pushy “You Know I’m No Good” and the sumptuous “Love Is a Loving Game” had an elegant, beguiling smudginess that avoided the wax-museum quality of so much retro soul. “My odds are stacked,” Winehouse sings. “I’ll go back to black.” Indeed, the pain and tumult in her voice was very real. Before her death in 2011, she left behind a tragically unfulfilled promise.

32 Beyoncé Lemonade Parkwood/Columbia, 2 “Nine times out of 10 I’m in my feelings,” Beyoncé announced on her heartbreak masterpiece, Lemonade. She dropped the album as a Saturday-night surprise, knocking the world sideways — her most expansive and personal statement, tapping into marital breakdown and the state of the nation. It was a different side than she’d shown before, raging over infidelity and jealousy, but reveling in the militant-feminist-funk strut of “Formation.” All over Lemonade she explores the betrayals of American blackness, claiming her place in all of America’s music traditions — she goes outlaw country on “Daddy Lessons,” she digs blues metal with Jack White on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” she revamps the Yeah Yeah Yeahs on “Hold Up.” Ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks — all hail the queen.

31 Miles Davis Kind of Blue Columbia, 1959 This painterly masterpiece is one of the most important, influential, and popular albums in jazz. At the time it was made, Kind of Blue was also a revolution all its own. Turning his back on standard chord progressions, trumpeter Miles Davis used modal scales as a starting point for composition and improvisation — breaking new ground with warmth, subtlety, and understatement in the thick of hard bop. Davis and his peerless band — bassist Paul Chambers, drummer Jimmy Cobb, pianist Bill Evans, and the titanic sax team of John Coltrane and Cannonball Adderley — soloed in uncluttered settings, typi fied by “melodic rather than harmonic variation,” as Davis put it. Two numbers, “All Blues” and “Freddie Freeloader” (the latter featuring Wynton Kelly at the ivories in place of Evans), are in 12-bar form, but Davis’ approach allowed his players a cool, new, collected freedom.

30 Jimi Hendrix Are You Experienced Track, 1967 This is what Britain sounded like in late 1966 and early 1967: ablaze with rainbow blues, orchestral guitar feedback, and cosmic possibility. Jimi Hendrix’s incendiary guitar was historic in itself, the luminescent sum of his chitlin-circuit labors with Little Richard and the Isley Brothers and his melodic exploitation of amp howl. But it was the pictorial heat of songs like “Manic Depression” and “The Wind Cries Mary” that established the transcendent promise of psychedelia. Backed by drummer Mitch Mitchell and bassist Noel Redding, the guitarist made soul music for inner space. “It’s a collection of free feeling and imagination,” he said of the album. “Imagination is very important.” Widely assumed to be about an acid trip, “Purple Haze” had “nothing to do with drugs,” Hendrix insisted. “‘Purple Haze’ was all about a dream I had that I was walking under the sea.”

29 The Beatles White Album Apple, 1968 They wrote the songs while on retreat with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in India, taking a break from the celebrity grind. As John Lennon later said, “We sat in the mountains eating lousy vegetarian food, and we
wrote all these songs.” They came back with more great tunes than they could release. Lennon pursued his hard-edged vision in the cynical wit of “Sexy Sadie” and “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” as well as the
childlike yearning of “Julia” and “Dear Prudence.” Paul McCartney’s playful pop energy came through in “Martha My Dear” and his inversion of Chuck Berry’s American values, “Back in the U.S.S.R.” George
28 D’Angelo Voodoo EMI, 2000 In the five spiritual
Harrison’s years following
yearningthe
ledrelease of his 1995
him to “Long, Long, debut, Brown
Long” and Sugar,
“While My D’Angelo grewWeeps,”
Guitar Gently disillusioned with
featuring a the genre
guest that
guitar had
solo justEric
from anointed him
Clapton. a rising
Even Ringostar.
Starr“Icontributes
don’t consider myself
his first an R&B
original, the artist,” the then-26-year-old told Jet. “R&B is pop, that’s the new word for R&B.” In his quest to create something new, he looked to both the masters of soul (Marvin, Curtis, Stevie) and contemporary innovators (Lauryn, Erykah). The end result was Voodoo, a moving, inventive masterpiece that stands as the ultimate achievement of the neo-soul era. Crafted with producer and drummer Questlove, who called the LP a “vicarious fantasy,” Voodoo places Pink Floyd-style cosmic jams (“Playa Playa”) next to Prince-inspired erotica (“Untitled [How Does It Feel]”). “I’m just looking at Voodoo as just the beginning,” D’Angelo said at the time. “It took a while, but I’m on my way now.”
country-tinged
27 Wu-Tang Clan Enter the Wu-Tang(36 Chambers) Loud, 1993 The first Wu-Tang Clan album launched rap’s most dominant franchise by inventing a new sound built around a hectic panoply of voices and spare, raw beats. RZA, the group’s sonic mastermind, constructed
the Wu’s homemade world, he said, from a mix of “Eastern philosophy picked up from kung-fu movies, watered-down Nation of Islam preaching picked up on the New York streets, and comic books.” On
“C.R.E.A.M.,” “Protect Ya Neck,” and the non-metaphorical “Wu-Tang Clan Ain’t Nuthing ta F’ Wit,” RZA’s offbeat samples (Thelonious Monk, the Dramatics, fellow New Yorker Barbra Streisand) create a
26 Patti Smith Horses Arista, 1975 From its first
grounding fordefiant line, “Jesus
the group’s died for somebody’s
nine members, sins, solo
including future but not mine,”
stars the Bastard,
Ol’ Dirty opening Raekwon,
shot in a bold
GZA,reinvention
Ghostface of Van Morrison’s
Killah, and Methodgarage-rock
Man. Dr. Dreclassic “Gloria,”
and Snoop DoggPatti
hadSmith’s debut L.A.
established album wascenter
as the a declaration of
of hip-hop
mutiny, a statement of faith in the transfigurative powers of rock & roll. Horses made her the queen of punk (her CBGB buddy Tom Verlaine of Television co-wrote the Jim Morrison tribute “Break It Up”), but
Smith cared more for the poetry in rock. She sought the visions and passions that connected Keith Richards and Rimbaud — and found them, with the intuitive assistance of a killer band (pianist Richard Sohl,
25 Carole King Tapestry Sony, 1971 For a decade,
guitarist LennyCarole King wrote
Kaye, bassist Ivanpop
Kral,songs with her Jay
and drummer then-husband,
Dee Daugherty)Gerry Goffin:
and hits such
her friend as Mapplethorpe,
Robert Little Eva’s “The
whoLoco-Motion” (Eva
shot the cover Boyd was
portrait. the
“The couple’s
real thing,”babysitter)
Smith laterand
said,the Monkees’
“was to keep“Pleasant
rock & rollValley
in the Sunday.” Then King’s friend James Taylor encouraged her to sing her own tunes. “He just made it look so easy,” she recalled. “So I did Tapestry in the same spirit.” She slowed down “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” (originally a hit for the Shirelles in 1961), with Taylor and Joni Mithcell on background vocals, heightening the melancholy inside, while her warm, earnest singing brought out the sadness in “It’s Too Late” and the earthy joy on “I Feel the Earth Move.” As King later recalled, “I wasn’t in the same league vocally with Aretha Franklin, Joni Mitchell, Barbara Streisand. But I knew how to convey the mood and emotion of a song with honest, straight-from-the-heart interpretation.” The resulting collection of songs saw King remake herself as an artist and became one of the biggest-selling albums of all time, creating the reigning model for the 1970s female singer-songwriter.
24 The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club BanCapitol, 1967 For the Beatles, it was a decisive goodbye to screaming crowds, world tours, and assembly-line record making. “We were fed up with being Beatles,” Paul McCartney said decades later. “We were not boys, we were men … artists rather than performers.” Sgt. Pepper christened the Summer of Love with the lavish psychedelic daydream “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds,” the jaunty Ringo Starr-sung communality anthem “With a Little Help From My Friends,” the album-closing multilayered masterwork, “A Day in the Life,” and the title track, which introduced the alter egos the Beatles had developed for the ambitious project. “It liberated you,” McCartney said. “You could do anything.” It is hard to imagine a more perfect setting for the Victorian jollity of John Lennon’s “Being for the Bene fit of Mr. Kite!” (inspired by an 1843 circus poster) or the sumptuous melancholy of McCartney’s “Fixing a Hole,” with its blend of antique shadows (a harpsichord played by the Beatles’ producer George Martin) and modern sunshine lead guitar executed with ringing precision by George Harrison). The Sgt. Pepper premise was a license to take their music in every direction — rock spent the rest of the Sixties trying to keep up.

23 The Velvet Underground The Velvet Underground and Nico Verve, 1967 “We were trying to do a Phil Spector thing with as few instruments as possible,” John Cale, the classically trained pianist and viola player of the Velvet Underground, once said of this record. It was no idle boast. Much of what we take for granted in rock would not exist without this New York band or its seminal debut: the androgynous sexuality of glitter, punk’s raw noir, the blackened-riff howl of grunge and noise rock. It is a record of fearless breadth and lyrical depth. Singer-songwriter Lou Reed documented carnal desire and drug addiction with a pop wisdom he learned as a song-factory composer for Pickwick Records. Cale introduced the power of pulse and drone (from his work in early minimalism); guitarist Sterling Morrison and drummer Maureen Tucker played with tribal force; Nico, a German vocalist brie fly added to the band by manager Andy Warhol, brought an icy femininity to the heated ennui in Reed’s songs. Rejected as nihilistic by the love crowd in 1967, the Banana Album (so named for its Warhol-designed cover), is the most prophetic rock album ever made.

22 The Notorious B.I.G. Ready to Die Bad Boy, 1994 The Notorious B.I.G. spread the love the Brooklyn way on his classic debut, introducing us to the most immediately likable voice in hip-hop history. “I made the record for New York, but I want the world to hear
it,” he said. Ready to Die executive producer Sean “Puffy” Combs, who’d read about the fledgling Brooklyn rapper in The Source magazine, pushed his new discovery to leaven the stick-up-kid self-
mythologizing of “Machine Gun Funk” and “Gimme the Loot” with inviting party-up pop like “Big Poppa” and the ecstatically playful origin story “Juicy.”
21 Bruce Springsteen Born to Run Columbia, 1975 Bruce Springsteen spent everything he had — patience, energy, studio time, the physical endurance of his E Street Band — to ensure that his third album was a masterpiece. His reputation as a perfectionist
begins here: There are a dozen guitar overdubs on the title track alone. He was also spending money he didn’t have. Engineer Jimmy Iovine had to hide the mounting recording bills from the Columbia
paymasters. “The album became a monster,” Springsteen told his biographer, Dave Marsh. “It just ate up everyone’s life.”
But in making Born to Run, Springsteen was living out the central drama in the album’s tenement-love operas (“Backstreets,” “Jungleland”) and gun-the-engine rock & roll (“Thunder Road,” “Born to Run”): the
20 Radiohead Kid A Parlophone, 2000A new,
fight to uniquely
reconcilefearless
big dreamskind with
of rock recordreality.
crushing for a new, increasingly
He found fearful
it so hard century,the
to translate Radiohead’s
sound in hisfourth
head album,
— thereleased
Jersey-barin dynamite
October 2000,
of hisremains one
live gigs, PhilofSpector’s
the moreWagnerian
stunning sonic makeovers
grandeur, in music history. The
the heartbreaking
band had the
melodrama offreedom to do whatever
Roy Orbison’s hits — that it Springsteen
wanted afternearly
its 1997 alt-rockBorn
scrapped breakthrough,
to Run for a OK Computerconcert
straight-up [see No.album.
42]. “Everyone expected us to
But his make-or-break becometothis
attention U2 type
detail of band,the
— including with thatcover
iconic stadium credibility,”
photo bassist
of Springsteen
Colin
leaning Greenwood
onto saxman saidClarence
in 2001. Clemons, a perfect metaphor for Springsteen’s brotherly reliance on the E Street Band — assured the integrity of Born to Run’s success. In his determination to make a great
Instead, frontman Thom Yorke gorged on albums by avant-techno innovator Aphex Twin and other artists on the Warp Records roster, inspiring him to put down his guitar and embrace the glacial beauty of
19 Kendrick Lamar To Pimp a Butterfly TDE, 2015 Kendrick Lamar had already
abstract electronics, provenand
glitchy beats, himself hip-hop’s of
the challenge boldest visionary
free-form — so by“It
composition. now,
waspeople expected
difficult greatness
for the others from
[in the him. ’cause
band], But he when
topped himself
you’re with To
working Pimp
with a Butterfly it’s
a synthesizer — alike
sprawling, ambitious
there’s no portrait
connection,” of
Yorke
America and his
said in 2017. dangerous
What emergedplace
was atin once
it, with a host
scary andofenveloping,
jazz influences. “It’sbetween
pitched a uniquedeepsound,” said longtime
alienation Lamartenderness
and profound producer Mark “Sounwave”
— from Spears.
the womblike “Every
ambient producer
flow I’ve everinmet
of “Everything was sending
Its Right methe
Place” to stuff [for the
free-jazz
album],
implosion but there
“The was a Anthem”
National one-in-a-million chance you could
to the gizmo-groove send a
paranoia ofbeat that actually fit what we were doing.” As Lamar said when the album was released, “I pride myself on writing now rather than rapping. My
“Idioteque.”
18 Bob Dylan Highway 61 Revisited Columbia, 1965 Bruce
passion Springsteen
is bringing has described
storylines the and
around beginning of “Likea afull
constructing Rolling
body Stone,”
of work,the opening
rather than song
just aon Bob Dylan’s
16-bar verse.” Highway 61 Revisited, as the “snare shot that sounded like somebody’d kicked open the door to your
mind.” In and of itself, “Like a Rolling Stone,” which was rumored to be about Andy Warhol acolyte Edie Sedgwick, forever altered the landscape of popular music — its “vomiti fic” lyrics (in Dylan’s memorable
term), literary ambition, and sheer length (6:13) shattered limitations of every kind. But that was literally only the beginning.
17 Kanye West My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy Our relationship with Kanye West was still in its love-hate phase when he created the 21st century’s most awe-inspiring hip-hop masterpiece. It’s an album every bit as chaotic as he was at the time — from the
Roc-A-Fella, 2010
creepy funk of “Gorgeous” to the crushing attack of “Hell of a Life.” After his Taylor Swift VMAs fiasco in 2009, West went into a kind of self-exile, eventually ending up in Hawaii, where he imported a huge
group of collaborators who included Justin Vernon of Bon Iver, Nicki Minaj, and RZA.
In all-night recording sessions, he’d ping between studios, sculpting his most maximalist music ever; “a song like ‘Power’ took 5,000 hours,” he later said, “like literally.” West pulled from everywhere — Elton
16 The Clash London Calling CBS, 1979 Recorded
John played in on
1979
“AllinofLondon, whichand
the Lights,” was then wrenched
“Power” sampledby surging unemployment
prog-rockers King Crimson.and drugsense
West’s addiction,
of hisand
own released
grandiose in America in bordered
ambitions January 1980, the
on the dawn ofduring
comical; an uncertain decade,
the writing London
process Calling
for the is 19 songs of
nine-minute
apocalypse
“Runaway,”fueled by an unbending
he famously faith in Pusha
told guest rapper rock &Troll to beat
to add “more back the darkness.
douchebag” Produced
to his verses. with no-surrender
The resulting trackenergy
opened bywith
legendary Sixtieseerie
just a single, studio madman
piano Guy Stevens,
note before buildingthe Clash’s
into third album
a mountainous, sounds tune
anarchic like athat
free-form
incorporated radio broadcastfrom
everything froma the
RickendJamesof the world,
sample toskidding
a vocoder from
thatbleak
evokedpunk (“London
Robert Calling”)
Fripp’s guitar to rampaging
playing on Brian skaEno
(“Wrong
albums.’Em Boyo”) and disco resignation (“Lost in the Supermarket”).
15 Public Enemy It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Def Jam, 1988 Loud, obnoxious, funky, avant-garde, political, uncompromising, hilarious – Public Enemy’s brilliant second album is all of these things — all at once. Chuck D booms intricate rhymes with a delivery inspired by
sportscaster Marv Albert; sidekick Flavor Flav raps comic relief; and production team the Bomb Squad build mesmerizing, multilayered jams, pierced with shrieking sirens. The title and roiling force of “Bring the
Noise” is truth in advertising. “If they’re calling my music ‘noise,’ ” said Chuck D, “if they’re saying that I’m really getting out of character being a black person in America, then fine – I’m bringing more noise.”
14 The Rolling Stones Exile on Main Street Rolling Stones RecordsA dirty whirl of basement blues and punk boogie, the Rolling Stones’ 1972 double LP was, according to Keith Richards, “maybe the best thing we did.” Indeed, inside its deliberately dense squall — Richards’
and Mick Taylor’s dogfight riffing, the lusty jump of the Bill Wyman–Charlie Watts rhythm engine, Mick Jagger’s caged-animal bark and burned-soul croon — is the Stones’ greatest album and Jagger and
Richards’ definitive songwriting statement of outlaw pride and dedication to grit and cold-morning redemption.

13 Aretha Franklin I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love Atlantic, 1967 Aretha Franklin’s Atlantic debut is the place where gospel music collided with R&B and rock & roll and became soul. The Detroit-born preacher’s daughter was about $80,000 in debt to her previous label,
Columbia, when Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler signed her in 1966. “I took her to church,” Wexler said, “sat her down at the piano, and let her be herself.”
Recording with the best session men at FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, she promptly cut the album’s title hit, a slow-fire ballad of ferocious sexuality. The historic moment, of course, was her
12 Michael Jackson Thriller Epic, 1982 Michael Jackson towered
storefront-church makeover over ofthe
OtisEighties
Redding’sthe “Respect,”
way no superstar before or
which became since hasfirst
Franklin’s dominated
Number an One era — single,
pop not even Elvis or the
prompting Beatles.
Redding And Thriller
to exclaim, is the
“I just lostreason
my song.”why.Soon,
Still init his early
would betwenties, the R&B child
the new marching star
anthem
of
of the
the 1970s
women’s hadand
ripened into amovements.
civil rights Technicolor soul man:did,
“Women a singer,
and still dancer, andequal
do, need songwriter with
rights,” incomparable
Franklin said decadescrossover
later.instincts.
“We’re doing the same job, we expect the same pay, and the same respect.” She
reinforced that feminism on “Do Right Woman, Do Right Man” and had the guts to wring more pathos from Sam Cooke’s civil rights anthem, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” than any other singer who has
He and producer Quincy Jones established the something-for-everyone template of Thriller on 1979’s Off the Wall [see No. 36], on which Jackson captures the rare mania of his life — the applause and
paranoia, the need for love and the fear of commitment — in a crisp fusion of pop hooks and dance beats. On Thriller, the pair heighten the sheen (the jaunty gloss of “The Girl Is Mine,” with a guest vocal by
Paul McCartney), pump up
the theater (the horror-movie spectacular “Thriller”), and deepen the funk. With its locomotive cadence and an acrobatic metal-guitar solo by Eddie Van Halen, “Beat It” was arguably the first industrial-disco
11 The Beatles Revolver Apple, 1966 Revolver
Number One. was the sound of the Beatles fully embracing the recording studio as a sonic canvas, free to pursue musical ideas and possibilities that would reshape rock forever. It speaks volumes that the first song
the band worked on upon entering Abbey Road studios in April 1966 would have been impossible to replicate live — a swirl of hazy guitar, backward tape loops, kaleidoscopic drum tumble, and John Lennon’s
voice recorded to sound like “the Dalai Lama singing from the highest mountaintop.” They titled it “The Void” and later renamed it “Tomorrow Never Knows.” “I was wondering how George Martin would take
it,” Paul McCartney later recalled. Martin’s response: “Jolly interesting.”
The Beatles’ lives were changing too: Lennon had taken LSD at this point, George Harrison was deepening his interest in Eastern mysticism, and McCartney was getting into avant-garde composition. All those
10 Lauryn Hill The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill Ruffhouse/Columbia, 1 “This is a very
influences came sexist industry,”
through here. Lauryn Hill told Essence magazine in 1998. “They’ll never throw the ‘genius’ title to a sister.” Though already a star as co-leader of the Fugees, with Wyclef Jean, she was hungry
to express her own vision. “[I wanted to] write songs that lyrically move me and have the integrity of reggae and the knock of hip-hop and the instrumentation of classic soul,” the singer said of her debut
album.
9 Bob Dylan Blood on the Tracks Columbia, 1975 Bob Dylan once introduced this album’s opening song, “Tangled Up in Blue,” onstage as taking him 10 years to live and two years to write. It was, for him, a pointed reference to the personal crisis — the
collapse of his marriage to Sara Lowndes — that at least partly inspired this album, Dylan’s best of the 1970s.
In fact, he wrote all of these lyrically piercing, gingerly majestic folk-pop songs in two months, in mid-1974. He was so proud of them that he privately auditioned almost all of the album, from start to finish, for
pals and peers, including Mike Bloomfield, David Crosby, and Graham Nash, before cutting them in September — in just a week, with members of the bluegrass band Deliverance.
But in December, Dylan played the record for his brother, David, in Minneapolis, who suggested recutting some songs with local musicians. The final Blood was a mix of New York and Minneapolis tapes; the
8 Prince and the Revolution Purple Rain Warner Bros., 1984 “I
Newthink
York Purple Rainare
versions is the mostmore
slower, avant-garde,
pensive, ‘purple’
while thething I’ve everversions
Minneapolis done,” Prince told Ebony
are faster in 1986.
and wilder. He wasthey
Together, still frame
a risingthestar withanguish
gritty only a couple of hits
in Dylan’s whenashe
vocals, hegot the through
rages audacious ideaoftohis
some makemosta passionate,
movie based
on his life, and
confessional make
songs —his
fromnext LP the
adult movie’s
breakup soundtrack.
ballads When
like “You’re it was
a Big Girlreleased
Now” and in “If
1984,
Youhe Seebecame
Her, Say theHello”
first artist
to thetosharp-tongued
have the Number One song,
opprobrium of album, and movie
“Idiot Wind,” in Northput-down
his greatest America.song since “Like a Rolling
But Purple Rain was so much more than a huge movie soundtrack: It was a testament to Prince’s dream of creating a utopian Top 40, a place where funk, psychedelia, heavy-metal shredding, huge ballads, and
Stone.”
daring experimentalism could coexist. “Listening to Purple Rain now, it’s kind of like a Beatles album,” keyboardist Matt Fink of the Revolution told Rolling Stone shortly after Prince’s death in 2016. “Every song
is just so brilliant in its own way — all so unique and different.”
7 Fleetwood Mac Rumours Warner Bros., 1977 With Rumours, Fleetwood Mac turned private turmoil into gleaming, melodic public art. The band’s two couples — bassist John McVie and singer-keyboard player Christine McVie, who were married; guitarist
Lindsey Buckingham and vocalist Stevie Nicks, who were not — broke up during the protracted sessions for the album. As John later told Rolling Stone of the atmosphere during the making of Rumours, “Parties
going on all over the house. Amazing. Terrifying. Huge amounts of illicit materials, yards and yards of this wretched stuff. Days and nights would just go on and on.”
6 Nirvana Nevermind Geffen, 1991 An overnight-success story of the 1990s, Nirvana’s second album and its totemic first single, “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” shot up from the Northwest underground — the nascent grunge scene in Seattle — to kick
Michael Jackson’s Dangerous off the top of the Billboard charts and blow hair metal off the map. Few albums have had such an overpowering impact on a generation — a nation of teens suddenly turned punk —
and such a catastrophic effect on its main creator. The weight of success led already-troubled singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain to take his own life in 1994.
But his slashing riffs, corrosive singing, and deviously oblique writing — rammed home by the Zeppelin-via-Pixies might of bassist Krist Novoselic and drummer Dave Grohl — put warrior purity back in rock &
5 The Beatles Abbey Road Apple, 1969 “It
roll.was a very Cobain
Lyrically, happy record,”
raged in said
codeproducer
— shorthandGeorge Martin,of
grenades describing
inner tumultthis and
album in The Beatles
self-loathing. Anthology.
His genius, “I guess
though, it was
in songs happy
like because
“Lithium,” everybody
“Breed,” thought
and “Teen it was
Spirit” going
was the to be the last.”
soft-loud tensionIndeed, Abbeybetween
he created Road —
recorded
verse andinchorus,
two months during
restraint and the summer
assault. of 1969
Cobain was a —pop
almost
lover never got made
at heart — andat a all. That January,
Beatlemaniac: the Beatles
Nevermind were on the
co-producer verge
Butch Vigofremembered
a breakup, exhausted
hearing Cobain and angry with Lennon’s
play John one another after
“Julia” atthe disastrous
sessions. Cobain
sessions
also fought fortothe abortedhis
maintain Get Back LP, later
underground salvaged
honor as Letlike
with songs It Be
the [see No. 342].
scabrous punkYet determined
purge to go
“Territorial out with the same glory with which they had first entranced the world at the start of the decade, the group
Pissings.”
4 Stevie Wonder Songs in the Key of Life Tamla/Motown, 1976 Months
reconvened beforeat the
EMI’srecording
Abbey Road sessions
Studiosfor Songs
to make in their
the Key
most of polished
Life ended, the musicians
album: a collectionin of
Stevie
superbWonder’s
songs cut band had
with anT-shirts
attention made up thatdetail,
to refined proclaimed, “We’retogether
then segued almost finished.”
(especially It was the Two)
on Side stockwith
answer to casual
conceptual
fans and Motown executives and everybody who’d fallen in love with Wonder’s early-Seventies gems – 1972’s Talking Book, 1973’s Innervisions, and 1974’s Fulfillingness’ First Finale – and who had been
waiting two years for the next chapter. “I believed there was a lot that needed to be said,” Wonder said. More, in fact, than he could fit onto a double album – also included was a bonus EP, a seven-inch single
with four more songs from the sessions.
Songs, released in 1976, encompasses an incredible range of life experiences – from the giddy joy of a baby in the bathtub (“Isn’t She Lovely,” featuring the cries and giggles of Wonder’s infant daughter Aisha
3 Joni Mitchell Blue Reprise, 1971 In 1971,through
Morris) Joni Mitchell represented
tributes the West
to his musical heroes Coast
(“Sirfeminine
Duke”) to ideal — celebrated
dismay about theby Robert Plant
indifference as “a
of the girl out(“Village
wealthy there with love Land”).
Ghetto in her eyes and pulled
Wonder flowersfrom
in her hair”imaginable
every on Led Zeppelin’s
musical “Goin’
source to— California.”
the ecstaticIt“Sir
was a
status
Duke” that MitchellDuke
references hadn’t askedand
Elington for and
Ella did not want:
Fitzgerald, “I went,
while “As” ‘Oh, my God,
featured Herbiea lot of people
Hancock on are listening
Fender Rhodes. to me,’” she recalled in 2013. “’They better find out who they’re worshiping. Let’s see if they can take it.
Let’s get real.’ So I wrote Blue.”
From its smoky, introspective cover to its wholly unguarded approach to songwriting, Blue is the first time any major rock or pop artist had opened up so fully, producing what might be the ultimate breakup
album and setting a still-unmatched standard for confessional poetry in pop music. Using acoustic instruments and her octave-leaping voice, Mitchell portrayed herself as a lonely painter, aching to make sense
2 The Beach Boys Pet Sounds Capitol, 1966 “Who’s
of all her gonna hear this
heartbreak. shit?”
She Beach
reflects on Boys singer Mike Love
past relationships asked the band’s
and encounters, resident
including a chefgenius, Brian (“Carey”)
from Crete Wilson, in and1966, as luminaries
rock Wilson played like him the new
Graham Nashsongs
(“My heOldwas working
Man”), on. “The
Leonard Cohen ears
(“AofCase
a dog?” Confronted
of You”), and
with
James his bandmate’s
Taylor contempt,
(“This Flight Wilson
Tonight”), whomade
lentlemonade
a hand onof a lemons.
few tracks. “Ironically,”
Along with heitsobserved,
romantic“Mike’s barb inspired
melancholy, Blue wasthe thealbum’s
sound of title.”
a woman availing herself of the romantic and sexual freedom that was, until
Barking dogs – Wilson’s dog Banana among them, in fact – are prominent among the found sounds on the album. The Beatles made a point of echoing them on Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band – an
acknowledgment that Pet Sounds was the inspiration for the Beatles’ masterpiece. That gesture actually completed a circle of influence: Wilson initially conceived of Pet Sounds as an effort to top the Beatles’
Rubber Soul. With its vivid orchestration, lyrical ambition, elegant pacing, and thematic coherence, Pet Sounds invented — and in several senses, perfected — the notion that an album could be more than the
1 Marvin Gaye What's Going On Tamla/Motown, 1971 Marvin
sum of Gaye’s
its parts.masterpiece
When Wilson began
sang, as“Wouldn’t
a reactionittobepolice
nice ifbrutality.
we wereIn May 1969,
older,” on theRenaldo
album’s“Obie” Benson,
magnificent the Four
opening Tops’
song, hebass
wasn’t singer, watched TV
just imagining coverage
a love of hundreds
that could of club-wielding
evolve past high school,copshe wasbreaking up thea new
suggesting
People’s Park, a protest hub in Berkeley. Aghast at the violence, Benson began to write a song with Motown lyricist Al Cleveland, trying to capture the confusion and pain of the times. He knew he had
something big in his nascent version of “What’s Going On,” but the rest of the Four Tops weren’t interested, and Benson’s efforts to get Joan Baez to record it didn’t work out, either.
But one of Motown’s biggest stars and greatest voices turned out to be more receptive. Gaye was in a dark and contemplative place, wounded by the death of his frequent duet partner Tammi Terrell, yearning
to sing subtler and more substantive material, and mulling over his brother Frankie’s horrifying tales of his recent stint fighting in Vietnam. Gaye had been keeping busy writing for and producing a group called
the Originals, and trying to figure out what was next. “I’d been stumbling around for an idea,” he told biographer David Ritz. “I knew there was more inside me. And that was something no record executive or
producer could see. But I saw it. I knew I had to get out there.”
After some hesitation, Gaye embraced “What’s Going On,” and with the help of arranger David Van De Pitte, crafted a version of the song that was jazzier and more sophisticated than any Motown recording to
date, layering cinematic strings over James Jamerson’s supernaturally sinuous bass line and a polyrhythmic groove. Gaye unleashed one of his most spectacular vocal performances in a career full of them,
scatting and improvising around the main melody.