top500albums/top_500_albums_2023_backup_20250630_211143.csv

1	Rank	Artist	Album	Status	Info	Description
2	1	The Beatles	Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band	+23	Capitol, 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 Benefit 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.
3	2	The Beach Boys	Pet Sounds	No change	Capitol, 1966	“Who’s gonna hear this shit?” Beach Boys singer Mike Love asked the band’s resident genius, Brian Wilson, in 1966, as Wilson played him the new songs he was working on. “The ears of a dog?” Confronted with his bandmate’s contempt, Wilson made lemonade of lemons. “Ironically,” he observed, “Mike’s barb inspired the album’s title.” 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 sum of its parts. When Wilson sang, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we were older,” on the album’s magnificent opening song, he wasn’t just imagining a love that could evolve past high school, he was suggesting a new grown-up identity for rock & roll music itself. Wilson made Pet Sounds without the rest of the band, using them only to flesh out the vocal arrangements. He even considered putting the album out as a solo project, and the first single, “Caroline, No,” was released under his own name. The personal nature of the songs, which Wilson co-wrote primarily with lyricist Tony Asher, further distinguished the album from the Beach Boys’ previous hits. Its luxurious sound conveys a heartbreaking wistfulness, as songs such as “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times” and “I’m Waiting for the Day” bid farewell to the innocent world of the early Sixties. The album’s centerpiece is “God Only Knows,” arranged with harpsichord, horns, sleigh bells, and strings to create a spiritual feeling Wilson later compared to “being blind, but in being blind, you can see more. You close your eyes; you’re able to see a place or something that’s happening.” In the years to come, countless artists would live in his vision.
4	3	The Beatles	Revolver	+8	Apple, 1966	Revolver 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 influences came through here. Revolver wasn’t totally without precedent. The Beatles’ previous album, Rubber Soul [see No. 35], had a similar experimental introspect. Harrison once said Rubber Soul and Revolver “could be volume one and volume two.” But no band, including the Beatles, had tried anything like McCartney’s strikingly mature art song “Eleanor Rigby,” Lennon’s trippy tape-loop swirl “I’m Only Sleeping,” or Harrison’s “Taxman,” with its cutting groove and lyrics that took shots at British politicians. It made sense that the disappointing live shows the band played in the summer of 1966 would be their last. By the time Revolver came out, they’d already entered another world.
5	4	Bob Dylan	Highway 61 Revisited	+14	Columbia, 1965	Bruce Springsteen has described the beginning of “Like a Rolling Stone,” the opening song on Bob Dylan’s 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 “vomitific” 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. The rest of the album, recorded in a shocking six days, was just as revelatory. If anyone questioned whether or not Dylan had truly “gone electric,” the roaring rock & roll of “From a Buick 6” and “Tombstone Blues” — both powered by legendary guitarist Mike Bloomfield of the Paul Butterfield Blues Band — left no doubt. The album ends with “Desolation Row,” a swirling 11-minute surrealist night journey of indescribable power, a Hieronymus Bosch-like season in hell that, in retrospect, seems to foretell all the Sixties cataclysms to come. Not that Dylan wasn’t having fun all the while as well. The toy siren that opens the album’s title track was keyboardist’s Al Kooper’s playful way of policing the recording sessions for Highway 61 Revisited. “If anybody started using drugs anywhere,” he explained, “I’d walk into the opposite corner of the room and just go whooooooooo.”
6	5	The Beatles	Rubber Soul	+30	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 hearing sounds that we weren’t able to hear before.”
7	6	Bob Dylan	Blonde on Blonde	+32	Columbia, 1966	Rock’s first studio 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 magnificence: 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.
8	7	The Beatles	The Beatles ("The White Album")	+22
9	8	The Clash	London Calling	+8	CBS, 1979	Recorded in 1979 in London, which was then wrenched by surging unemployment and drug addiction, and released in America in January 1980, the dawn of an uncertain decade, London Calling is 19 songs of apocalypse fueled by an unbending faith in rock & roll to beat back the darkness. Produced with no-surrender energy by legendary Sixties studio madman Guy Stevens, the Clash’s third album sounds like a free-form radio broadcast from the end of the world, skidding from bleak punk (“London Calling”) to rampaging ska (“Wrong ’Em Boyo”) and disco resignation (“Lost in the Supermarket”). The album was made in dire straits too. Although the Clash fired singles into the Britain’s Top 40 with machine-gun regularity, the band was heavily in debt and openly at war with its record company. Singer-guitarists Joe Strummer and Mick Jones, the Clash’s Lennon and McCartney, wrote together in Jones’ grandmother’s flat, where he was living for lack of dough. “Joe, once he learned how to type, would bang the lyrics out at a high rate of good stuff,” Jones noted. “Then I’d be able to bang out some music while he was hitting the typewriter.” Stevens was on hand for inspiration. He threw chairs around the room “if he thought a track needed zapping up,” according to Strummer. The album ends with “Train in Vain,” a rousing song of fidelity (originally unlisted on the back cover) that became the sound of triumph: the Clash’s first Top 30 single in the U.S.
10	9	Bob Dylan	Blood on the Tracks	No change	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 New York versions are slower, more pensive, while the Minneapolis versions are faster and wilder. Together, they frame the gritty anguish in Dylan’s vocals, as he rages through some of his most passionate, confessional songs — from adult breakup ballads like “You’re a Big Girl Now” and “If You See Her, Say Hello” to the sharp-tongued opprobrium of “Idiot Wind,” his greatest put-down song since “Like a Rolling Stone.” “A lot of people tell me they enjoyed that album,” Dylan said soon after it became an instant commercial and critical success. “It’s hard for me to relate to that — I mean, people enjoying that type of pain.” Yet Dylan had never turned so much pain into so much musical splendor.
11	10	The Beatles	Abbey Road	-5	Apple, 1969	“It was a very happy record,” said producer George Martin, describing this album in The Beatles Anthology. “I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.” Indeed, Abbey Road — recorded in two months during the summer of 1969 — almost never got made at all. That January, the Beatles were on the verge of a breakup, exhausted and angry with one another after the disastrous sessions for the aborted Get Back LP, later salvaged as Let It Be [see No. 342]. Yet determined to go out with the same glory with which they had first entranced the world at the start of the decade, the group reconvened at EMI’s Abbey Road Studios to make their most polished album: a collection of superb songs cut with an attention to refined detail, then segued together (especially on Side Two) with conceptual force. There was no thematic link, other than the Beatles’ unique genius. John Lennon veered from the stormy metal of “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” to the exquisite vocal sunrise of “Because.” Paul McCartney was saucy (“Oh! Darling”), silly (“Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”), and deliciously bitter (“You Never Give Me Your Money”). George Harrison proved his long-secret worth as a composer with “Something” (later covered by Frank Sinatra) and the folk-pop diamond “Here Comes the Sun,” written in his friend Eric Clapton’s garden after a grim round of business meetings. Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison reputedly sang more three-part harmonies here than on any other Beatles album. That warm feeling — a sense of an increasingly divided band warmly coming together as friends — may be one reason Abbey Road has become the most beloved Beatles album of all time.
12	11	The Velvet Underground	The Velvet Underground & Nico	+132	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 briefly 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.
13	12	The Rolling Stones	Exile on Main St.	New in 2023	Rolling Stones Records, 1972	A 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. In the existential shuffle of “Tumbling Dice,” the ­exhausted country beauty of “Torn and Frayed,” and the whiskey-soaked church of “Shine a Light,” you literally hear the Stones in exile: working at Richards’ villa in the South of France, on the run from media censure, British drug police (Jagger and Richards had been busted and arrested before), and the U.K.’s then-onerous tax code. The music rattles with corrosive abandon but also swings with a clear purpose — unconditional survival — in “Rocks Off” and “All Down the Line.” As Richards explained, “The Stones don’t have a home anymore — hence the exile — but they can still keep it together. Whatever people throw at us, we can still duck, improvise, overcome.” Great example: Richards ­recorded his jubilant romp “Happy” with only producer Jimmy Miller on drums and sax man Bobby Keys, while waiting for the other Stones to turn up for work. Exile on Main Street is the band at its fighting best, armed with the blues, playing to win.
14	13	Marvin Gaye	What's Going On	-12	Tamla/Motown, 1971	Marvin Gaye’s masterpiece began as a reaction to police brutality. In May 1969, Renaldo “Obie” Benson, the Four Tops’ bass singer, watched TV coverage of hundreds of club-wielding cops breaking up the 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. Motown Records founder Berry Gordy initially resisted releasing “What’s Going On,” telling Gaye that he thought scatting was out of date and protest lyrics were too commercially risky. But when the song became an instant hit, Gordy gave Gaye a single month to craft an album to accompany “What’s Going On.” Gaye more than rose to the challenge. “I work best under pressure and when I’m depressed,” he told the Detroit Free Press at the time. “The world’s never been as depressing as it is right now. We’re killing the planet, killing our young men in the streets, and going to war around the world. Human rights … that’s the theme.” What emerged was soul music’s first concept album, and one of the most important and influential LPs ever made. John Legend recently described it as “the voice of black America speaking out that we couldn’t always smile on cue for you.” Building it all around one finished song lent What’s Going On a musical and thematic through line. “What’s Happening Brother” assumes the voice of a Vietnam vet like Gaye’s brother, puzzled by a changing America and looking for work; “Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)” is a taut ode to the environment; “Flyin’ High (In the Friendly Sky)” takes on drug addiction. After What’s Going On, black musicians at Motown and elsewhere felt a new freedom to push the musical and political boundaries of their art. “When I was struggling for the right of the Motown artist to express himself,” Gaye said, “Stevie [Wonder] knew I was also struggling for him.” At the end of the final song on What’s Going On, the lament “Inner City Blues (Make Me Wanna Holler),” the music shifts back into a jazzier reprise of the title track. As the album fades out, the groove continues on. Five decades later, it still hasn’t stopped.
15	14	Joni Mitchell	Blue	-11	Reprise, 1971	In 1971, Joni Mitchell represented the West Coast feminine ideal — celebrated by Robert Plant as “a girl out there with love in her eyes and flowers in her hair” on Led Zeppelin’s “Goin’ to California.” It was a status that Mitchell hadn’t asked for and did not want: “I went, ‘Oh, my God, a lot of people are listening 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 of all her heartbreak. She reflects on past relationships and encounters, including a chef from Crete (“Carey”) and rock luminaries like Graham Nash (“My Old Man”), Leonard Cohen (“A Case of You”), and James Taylor (“This Flight Tonight”), who lent a hand on a few tracks. Along with its romantic melancholy, Blue was the sound of a woman availing herself of the romantic and sexual freedom that was, until then, an exclusively male province in rock. The songs had such stark, emotional intensity that it shocked the men around her: “Kris Kristofferson said to me, ‘Oh, Joni. Save something for yourself.’ The vulnerability freaked them out.” On “Little Green,” she opens up about a baby she had given up for adoption, and on the staggering piano dirge “River,” she takes responsibility for a romance gone wrong, changing the scope of love songs forever: “I’m so hard to handle/I’m selfish, and I’m sad,” she laments. “Now I’ve gone and lost the best baby/That I ever had.” Mitchell continued to release excellent records throughout the Seventies, but Blue remains her masterpiece. “The Blue album, there’s hardly a dishonest note in the vocals,” she told Rolling Stone in 1979. “At that period of my life, I had no personal defenses. I felt like a cellophane wrapper on a pack of cigarettes. I felt like I had absolutely no secrets from the world, and I couldn’t pretend in my life to be strong. Or to be happy. But the advantage of it in the music was that there were no defenses there either.”
16	15	Nirvana	Nevermind	-9	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 & roll. Lyrically, Cobain raged in code — shorthand grenades of inner tumult and self-loathing. His genius, though, in songs like “Lithium,” “Breed,” and “Teen Spirit” was the soft-loud tension he created between verse and chorus, restraint and assault. Cobain was a pop lover at heart — and a Beatlemaniac: Nevermind co-producer Butch Vig remembered hearing Cobain play John Lennon’s “Julia” at sessions. Cobain also fought to maintain his underground honor with songs like the scabrous punk purge “Territorial Pissings.” Ultimately, it was a losing battle, but it is part of this album’s enduring power. Vig recalled when Cobain was forced to overdub the guitar intro to “Teen Spirit” because he couldn’t nail it live with the band: “That pissed him off. He wanted to play [the song] live all the way through.”
17	16	Van Morrison	Astral Weeks	+44	Warner Bros., 1968	Astral Weeks was the sound of sweet relief. Van Morrison was newly signed to artist-friendly Warner Bros., after a rough ride with his previous U.S. label, Bang, when he made Astral Weeks in the summer of 1968. He used the opportunity to explore the physical and dramatic range of his voice in his extended poetic-scat singing, setting hallucinatory reveries about his native Belfast (the daydream memoir “Cypress Avenue,” the hypnotic portrait of “Madame George”) to wandering melodies connecting the earthy poetry in Celtic folk and American R&B. The crowning touch was a superior jazz quartet, who recorded their basic backing tracks in one three-hour session, without any instruction from Morrison on what he wanted or what the lyrics meant.
18	17	The Who	Who's Next	+60	Decca, 1971	Pete Townshend suffered a nervous breakdown when his planned follow-up to the rock opera Tommy [see No. 190], the ambitious, theatrical Lifehouse, fell apart. But he was left with an extraordinary cache of songs that the Who honed for what became their best studio album, Who’s Next. “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” “Bargain,” and “Baba O’Riley” (named in tribute to avant-garde composer Terry Riley) all beam with epic majesty, often spiked with synthesizers. “I like synthesizers,” Townshend said, “because they bring into my hands things that aren’t in my hands: the sound of the orchestra, French horns, strings.… You press a switch and it plays it back at double speed.”
19	18	Neil Young	After the Gold Rush	+72	Reprise, 1970	For his third album, Neil Young fired Crazy Horse (the first of many times he would do so), picked up an acoustic guitar, and headed to his basement. He installed recording equipment in the cellar of his Topanga Canyon home, near Los Angeles, leaving room for only three or four people. There, Young made an album of heartbreaking ballads such as “Tell Me Why” and “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.” The music is gentle, but never smooth. Nils Lofgren, then an 18-year-old hotshot guitarist, squeezed into the sessions — but Young assigned him to the piano, an instrument he had never played in his life.
20	19	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin IV	+39	Atlantic, 1971	“I put a lot of work into my lyrics,” Robert Plant told Rolling Stone in 1975. “Not all my stuff is meant to be scrutinized, though. Things like ‘Black Dog’ are blatant let’s-do-it-in-the-bath-type things, but they make their point just the same.” On their towering rune-titled fourth album, Led Zeppelin matched the raunch of “Black Dog” with Plant’s most poetic lyrics on the inescapable epic ballad “Stairway to Heaven,” while guitarist Jimmy Page veers from the blues apocalypse of “When the Levee Breaks” to the mandolin-driven “Battle of Evermore.” (“It sounded like a dance-around-the-maypole number,” Page later confessed.)
21	20	Stevie Wonder	Songs in the Key of Life	-16	Tamla/Motown, 1976	Months before the recording sessions for Songs in the Key of Life ended, the musicians in Stevie Wonder’s band had T-shirts made up that proclaimed, “We’re almost finished.” It was the stock answer to casual 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 Morris) through tributes to his musical heroes (“Sir Duke”) to dismay about the indifference of the wealthy (“Village Ghetto Land”). Wonder pulled from every imaginable musical source — the ecstatic “Sir Duke” references Duke Elington and Ella Fitzgerald, while “As” featured Herbie Hancock on Fender Rhodes. Though Wonder’s blindness meant he could record faster by memorizing lyrics, some songs had four or five intricate verses, so somebody had to prompt him. Often it was engineer John Fischbach, reading lines into the headphone mix just seconds before Wonder sang them. “He never got thrown off,” engineer John Fischbach told Rolling Stone years later. “His vocals had so much power.” The album’s mastery of many styles remains astonishing, but the feat might not have meant so much had Wonder not delivered some of his most impassioned political art as well, like the autobiographical “I Wish,” the takedown of wealthy complacency “Village Ghetto Land,” and, perhaps most movingly, “Black Man,” in which he runs down a funky list of global Afro-diasporic aspirations and heroes. Songs in the Key of Life linked all this together, in Wonder’s all-encompassing innervision.
22	21	Bob Dylan	Bringing It All Back Home	+160	Columbia, 1965	“It’s very complicated to play with electricity,” Dylan said in the summer of 1965. “You’re dealing with other people.… Most people who don’t like rock & roll can’t relate to other people.” But on Side One of this pioneering album, Dylan amplifies his cryptic, confrontational songwriting with guitar lightning and galloping drums. “Subterranean Homesick Blues” and “Maggie’s Farm” are loud, caustic, and funny as hell. Dylan returns to solo acoustic guitar on the four superb songs on Side Two, including the scabrous “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)” and the closing ballad, “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue,” arguably his finest, most affectionate song of dismissal.
23	22	U2	The Joshua Tree	+113	Island, 1987	“America’s the promised land to a lot of Irish people,” U2 singer Bono told Rolling Stone. “I’m one in a long line of Irishmen who made the trip.” On U2’s fifth full album, the band immerses itself in the mythology of the United States, while guitarist the Edge exploits the poetic echo of digital delay, drowning his trademark arpeggios in rippling tremolo. While many of these songs are about spiritual quests — “Where the Streets Have No Name,” “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” — U2 fortify the solemnity with the outright joys of rock & roll, although one of the most moving songs is “Running to Stand Still,” a stripped-down slide-guitar ballad about heroin addiction.
24	23	Television	Marquee Moon	+84	Elektra, 1977	When the members of Television materialized in New York, at the dawn of punk, they played an incongruous, soaring amalgam of genres: the noirish howl of the Velvet Underground, brainy art rock, the double-helix guitar sculpture of Quicksilver Messenger Service. As exhilarating in its lyrical ambitions as the Ramones’ debut was in its brutal simplicity, Marquee Moon still amazes. “Friction,” “Venus,” and the mighty title track are jagged, desperate, and beautiful all at once. As for punk credentials, don’t forget the cryptic electricity and strangled existentialism of guitarist Tom Verlaine’s voice and songwriting.
25	24	The Rolling Stones	Let It Bleed	+17	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.'”
26	25	Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band	Trout Mask Replica	New in 2023
27	26	Patti Smith	Horses	No change	Arista, 1975	From its first defiant line, “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine,” the opening shot in a bold reinvention of Van Morrison’s garage-rock classic “Gloria,” Patti Smith’s debut album was a declaration of 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, guitarist Lenny Kaye, bassist Ivan Kral, and drummer Jay Dee Daugherty) and her friend Robert Mapplethorpe, who shot the cover portrait.  “The real thing,” Smith later said, “was to keep rock & roll in the hands of the people.”
28	27	Carole King	Tapestry	-2	Sony, 1971	For a decade, Carole King wrote pop songs with her then-husband, Gerry Goffin: hits such as Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion” (Eva Boyd was the couple’s babysitter) and the Monkees’ “Pleasant Valley 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.
29	28	Aretha Franklin	Lady Soul	+47	Atlantic, 1968	Aretha Franklin’s third Atlantic album in less than two years is another classic, with “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman,” “Ain’t No Way,” and a slinky version of the Rascals’ “Groovin’.” It was a year of triumph and turbulence for Franklin: Although she made the cover of Time, the magazine reported details of her rocky marriage to Ted White, then her manager. But Franklin channeled that frenzy into performances of funky pride and magisterial hurt. Among the best: the grand-prayer treatment of Curtis Mayfield’s “People Get Ready” and her explosive anguish on the hit “Chain of Fools.”
30	29	Brian Eno	Another Green World	+309	Island, 19755	After years as a rock eccentric with Roxy Music and two groundbreaking solo LPs, Brian Eno was exploring new ideas about ambient music. But he said goodbye to song form with this album of pure synthetic beauty, mixing lush electronics (“Becalmed”) with acoustic instruments (“Everything Merges With the Night”) to cast a truly hypnotic spell. Eno’s work habits were pleasantly subversive too; at one impasse during the recording, he pulled out a cake from underneath the mixing console and served pieces to everyone in the studio.
31	30	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin II	+93	Atlantic, 1969	This album — recorded on the fly while the band was touring — opens with one of the most exhilarating guitar riffs in rock & roll: Jimmy Page’s searing stutter in “Whole Lotta Love.” As Page told Rolling Stone, “On the second LP, you can hear the real group identity coming together,” by which he meant the unified might of his own white-blues sorcery, John Bonham’s hands-of-Zeus drumming, Robert Plant’s love-god howl and surprisingly tender lyrics (the gorgeous “Thank You”), and John Paul Jones’ firm bass and keyboard colors. Other great reasons to bang your head: “The Lemon Song,” “Heartbreaker,” and “Ramble On.”
32	31	Talking Heads	Remain in Light	+8	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 to “Once in a Lifetime.”
33	32	Radiohead	OK Computer	+10	Capitol, 1997	Radiohead recorded their third album in the mansion of actress Jane Seymour 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.’”
34	33	Paul Simon	Graceland	+13	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 become the whole world’s soundtrack.
35	34	Pink Floyd	The Dark Side of the Moon	+21	EMI, 1973	“I think every album was a step towards Dark Side of the Moon,” keyboardist Rick Wright said. “We were learning all the time; the techniques of the recording and our writing was getting better.” As a culmination of their inner-space explorations of the early 1970s, the Floyd toured the bulk of Dark Side in Britain for months prior to recording. But in the studio, the band articulated bassist Roger Waters’ reveries on the madness of everyday life with melodic precision (“Breathe,” “Us and Them”) and cinematic luster (Clare Torry’s guest vocal aria “The Great Gig in the Sky”). Dark Side is one of the best-produced rock albums ever, and “Money” may be rock’s only Top 20 hit in 7/4 time.
36	35	The Smiths	The Queen Is Dead	+78	Sire, 1986	Morrissey’s maudlin moanings have never been more acidic or self-aware than on the Smiths’ third studio album: “A dreaded sunny day, so let’s go where we’re happy/And I meet you at the cemetery gates,” indeed. Johnny Marr is the sugar to Morrissey’s rock salt, and his layered webs of guitar riffs and arpeggios, often in unconventional tunings, build a shifting but stable platform for Morrissey to croon about the drudgery of employment or being cruelly, cruelly shunned by the world. It’s mope rock with its eye on grandeur: With “Bigmouth Strikes Again,” Marr said, “I was trying to write my ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash.’”
37	36	David Bowie	Low	+170	RCA, 1977	David Bowie fled to Berlin to kick cocaine — not to mention his other drug of choice, stardom. He moved into a flat above a hardware store and restarted his music from scratch, teaming up with Brian Eno and producer Tony Visconti. Low was split between electronic instrumentals and quirky funk like “Sound and Vision.” It began his famous “Berlin trilogy” — though it was cut mostly in France — topped off by Heroes and Lodger. In 1977, Bowie also produced Iggy Pop’s two finest solo albums, The Idiot and Lust for Life.
38	37	Randy Newman	Sail Away	+231	Reprise, 1972	Producer Lenny Waronker called him the “King of the Suburban Blues Singers.” Randy Newman went on to a long career scoring Hollywood movies, but on Sail Away, he was still L.A.’s weirdest singer-songwriter, a piano man singing sardonic tales of sleazy grifters in tunes full of New Orleans R&B and Tin Pan Alley showbiz. Sail Away is his meanest and funniest American portrait, with the cold-blooded “Political Science,” the blasphemous “God’s Song,” and the romantic “You Can Leave Your Hat On.”
39	38	Miles Davis	Kind of Blue	-7	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, typified 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.
40	39	The Rolling Stones	Sticky Fingers	+65	Rolling Stones, 1971	Drummer Charlie Watts remembered the origin of Sticky Fingers as the songs Mick Jagger wrote while filming the movie Ned Kelly in Australia. “Mick started playing the guitar a lot,” Watts said. “He plays very strange rhythm guitar … very much how Brazilian guitarists play, on the upbeat. It is very much like the guitar on a James Brown track — for a drummer, it’s great to play with.” New guitarist Mick Taylor, replacing Brian Jones, stretches out the Stones sound in “Sway,” “Can’t You Hear Me Knocking,” and “Moonlight Mile.” But “Brown Sugar” is a classic Stones stomp, and two of the best cuts are country songs: one forlorn (“Wild Horses”) and one funny (“Dead Flowers”).
41	40	Jimi Hendrix Experience	Are You Experienced	New in 2023
42	41	Sly & the Family Stone	There's a Riot Goin' On	+41	Epic, 1971	This highly anticipated studio follow-up to Sly and the Family Stone’s 1969 blast of hope, Stand!, was the grim, exact opposite: implosive, numbing, darkly self-referential. Sly Stone’s voice is an exhausted grumble; the funk in “Family Affair,” “Runnin’ Away,” and especially the closing downward spiral, “Thank You for Talkin’ to Me Africa,” is spare and bleak, fiercely compelling in its anguish over the unfulfilled promises of civil rights and hippie counterculture. “It is Muzak with its finger on the trigger,” wrote critic Greil Marcus in Mystery Train. Take that as a recommendation.
43	42	Bob Dylan & the Band	The Basement Tapes	+293	Columbia, 1975	Bob Dylan and his pals spent the Summer of Love in Woodstock, messing around in the basement of a house they called Big Pink. The songs were so deeply weird, they sat unreleased for years, until The Basement Tapes finally collected bootleg favorites like “Million Dollar Bash” and “You Ain’t Going Nowhere.” (For a deeper dive, see the 2014 box set.) “They were a kick to do,” Dylan told Rolling Stone’s Jann S. Wenner in 1969. “That’s really the way to do a recording — in a peaceful, relaxed setting — in somebody’s basement. With the windows open … and a dog lying on the floor.”
44	43	Prince and the Revolution	Purple Rain	-35	Warner Bros., 1984	“I think Purple Rain is the most avant-garde, ‘purple’ thing I’ve ever done,” Prince told Ebony in 1986. He was still a rising star with only a couple of hits when he got the audacious idea to make a movie based on his life, and make his next LP the movie’s soundtrack. When it was released in 1984, he became the first artist to have the Number One song, album, and movie in North America. 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 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.” It’s an incredible balance of contradicting impulses — from the pornographic “Darling Nikki” to the sparkling innocence of “Take Me With You.” When Purple Rain director Albert Magnoli asked for a good song to back a montage sequence, Prince came in the next day with “When Doves Cry,” a stark, eccentric-sounding brokenhearted song that became his first Number One single. The title track was one of several songs recorded live at his hometown club, First Avenue, in Minneapolis (strings and overdubs were added later in the studio). It was inspired by Bob Seger, of all people — when Prince was touring behind 1999 [see No. 130] in 1983, Seger was playing many of the same markets. Prince didn’t understand the Midwestern rocker’s appeal, but decided to try a ballad in the Seger mode — the result may be the greatest rock ballad of all time.
45	44	Pavement	Slanted and Enchanted	+155	Matador, 1993	Pavement were the quintessential American independent rock band, and this is the quintessential indie-rock album. The playing is loose-limbed, the production laid-back and primitive, the lyrics quirky and playful, the melodies sweet and seductive. But the sound is as intense as the white noise of the Velvet Underground, even as songs like “Summer Babe” reflect singer-guitarist Stephen Malkmus’ love of Seventies AM pop. Slanted and Enchanted is one of the most influential rock albums of the 1990s; its fuzzy recording style can be heard in the music of Nirvana, Liz Phair, Beck, the Strokes, and the White Stripes.
46	45	Bruce Springsteen	Born to Run	-24	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 fight to reconcile big dreams with crushing reality. He found it so hard to translate the sound in his head — the Jersey-bar dynamite of his live gigs, Phil Spector’s Wagnerian grandeur, the heartbreaking melodrama of Roy Orbison’s hits — that Springsteen nearly scrapped Born to Run for a straight-up concert album. But his make-or-break attention to detail — including the iconic cover photo of Springsteen leaning onto saxman Clarence 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 album, Springsteen produced a timeless, inspiring record about the labors and glories of aspiring to greatness.
47	46	Stevie Wonder	Innervisions	-12	Tamla/Motown, 1973	“We as a people are not interested in ‘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.”
48	47	Love	Forever Changes	+133	Elektra, 1967	“When I did that album,” singer Arthur Lee said, “I thought I was going to die at that particular time, so those were my last words.” Lee, who died of cancer in 2006, was still performing this album live well into the ‘00s. And for good reason: Love’s third record is his crowning achievement. A biracial cult band from L.A. that rarely gigged out of town in its 1960s heyday, Love were Lee’s vehicle for a pioneering folk-rock turned into elegant armageddon with the symphonic sweep and mariachi-brass drama of “Alone Again Or,” “Andmoreagain,” and “You Set the Scene.” In the late Nineties, Lee served time in prison. After his release, he brought extra pathos to “Live and Let Live” when he sang, “Served my time, served it well.”
49	48	Public Enemy	It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back	-33	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.” Along with “Bring the Noise,” Nation classics like “Rebel Without a Pause” were conceived at Spectrum City in the band headquarters in Hempstead, New York. For “Rebel,” producer Hank Shocklee of the Bomb Squad looped a piercing sample of James Brown’s “The Grunt” with Brown’s “Funky Drummer” (“That song was like my milk,” said Shocklee). To write verses that could match such a sonic assault, Chuck locked himself in his house for 24 hours and emerged with broadsides like the media screed “Don’t Believe the Hype.” He wasn’t sure of the results until DMC, of Run-DMC, blasted it out of his Bronco on a Saturday night. Says Shocklee, “The whole block was grooving to it.”
50	49	The Stooges	Fun House	+45	Elektra, 1970	With garage-savvy ex-Kingsmen keyboardist Don Gallucci producing their second album, the Stooges made their most fully realized effort, despite their collective drug problems. “We had a certain purity of intention,” Iggy Pop asserted. “I don’t think we did ever get it from the drugs. I think they killed things.” They couldn’t kill what he has called the relentless “troglodyte groove” the band had on Fun House. “I stick it deep inside,” Iggy growls on “Loose,” one of the album’s typically confrontational tracks. Later, on “1970,” he insisted, ad infinitum, “I feel all right,” and there’s no question you wouldn’t want any of whatever he was on.
51	50	Neil Young	Harvest	+22	Reprise, 1972	Harvest yielded Neil Young’s only Number One hit, “Heart of Gold,” and helped set the stage for the Seventies soft-rock explosion — both James Taylor and Linda Ronstadt sing on the album. Along with Young, they were in Nashville to appear on Johnny Cash’s variety show the week that Harvest was cut with an odd group of accomplished session musicians that included bassist Tim Drummond, who had played with James Brown. The sound was Americana — steel guitar, slide guitar, banjo — stripped down and rebuilt with every jagged edge exposed. The standout tracks include “Old Man” and “The Needle and the Damage Done.”
52	51	John Lennon	Plastic Ono Band	+34	Apple, 1970	Also known as the “primal scream” album, referring to the painful therapy that gave rise to its songs, Plastic Ono Band was John Lennon’s first proper solo album and rock & roll’s most self-revelatory recording. Lennon attacks and denies idols and icons, including his own former band (“I don’t believe in Beatles,” he sings in “God”), to hit a pure, raw core of confession that, in its echo-drenched, garage-rock crudity, is years ahead of punk. He deals with childhood loss in “Mother” and skirts blasphemy in “Working Class Hero”: “You’re still fucking peasants as far as I can see.” But the unkindest cut came in his frank 1970 Rolling Stone interview. “The Beatles was nothing,” Lennon stated acerbically.
53	52	Bob Dylan	The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan	+203	Columbia, 1963	Bob Dylan’s second LP was released on May 27th, 1963 – three days after his 22nd birthday. It was a tender age for such a triumph. On Freewheelin’, the poetry and articulate fury of Dylan’s lyrics and his simple, compelling melodies transformed American popular songwriting. His wholly original grip on grit, truth, and beauty in “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” and “Masters of War” still changes everyone who hears this album, four decades later.
54	53	Nick Drake	Five Leaves Left	New in 2023
55	54	R.E.M.	Murmur	+111	I.R.S., 1983	“We wanted to have this kind of timeless record,” guitarist Peter Buck said of R.E.M.’s debut LP, and this “technically limited” band (according to producer Don Dixon) did just that. Buck was a rock scholar who had worked in a record store; singer Michael Stipe unspooled his lyrics as if they constituted some new secret language. Murmur is full of ringing guitars and mystery. The lyrics and the melodies seem buried, almost subliminal, and even the songs with something approximating hooks, such as “Radio Free Europe,” resist clarity. Murmur was a founding document of alternative rock, released just as Gen X was heading off to college.
56	55	Michael Jackson	Thriller	-43	Epic, 1982	Michael Jackson towered over the Eighties the way no superstar before or since has dominated an era — not even Elvis or the Beatles. And Thriller is the reason why. Still in his early twenties, the R&B child star of the 1970s had ripened into a Technicolor soul man: a singer, dancer, and songwriter with incomparable crossover instincts. 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 Number One. It is hard now to separate Thriller from its commercial stature (Number One for 37 weeks, 33 million copies sold), the nightmarish tabloid celebrity that led to Jackson’s death, and the horrific revelations about him that have surfaced in recent years. But there was a time when we only knew Jackson as the King of Pop. This is it.
57	56	Wire	Pink Flag	+254	Harvest, 1977	This first-generation U.K. punk band made sparse tunes that erupted in combustible snippets on its 21-track debut album. America never got it, but Pink Flag — as revolutionary discs tend to do — influenced some important bands, including Sonic Youth and the Minutemen. It also might be one of the most-covered punk LPs ever: Minor Threat did “12XU,” R.E.M. did “Strange,” the New Bomb Turks did “Mr. Suit,” Spoon did “Lowdown,” the Lemonheads did “Fragile,” and on and on.
58	57	Fleetwood Mac	Rumours	-50	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.” This frenzied, decadent vibe lent a highly charged, confessional aura to such songs as Buckingham’s “Go Your Own Way,” Nicks’ “Dreams,” Christine’s “Don’t Stop,” and the group-composed anthem to betrayal, “The Chain.” The band’s soap opera fueled its own intricate creative conversation; on “You Make Loving Fun,” Christine sang about her new boyfriend, the band’s lighting designer, as her ex John dutifully drives home the song with a sunny, funky bass line. To write “Dreams,” Nicks sat on a black velvet bed in a tiny room hidden deep in the Record Plant, where the band was recording, creating one of her most haunting songs in 10 minutes. “[In ‘Go Your Own Way’] Lindsey is saying go ahead and date other men and go live your crappy life, and [I’m] singing about the rain washing you clean,” Nicks said. “We were coming at it from opposite angles, but we were really saying the same exact thing.” The Mac’s catchy exposés, produced with California-sunshine polish, touched a nerve: Rumours became the sixth-best-selling album of all time.
59	58	The Sex Pistols	Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols	+22	Warner Bros., 1977	“If the sessions had gone the way I wanted, it would have been unlistenable for most people,” Johnny Rotten said. “I guess it’s the very nature of music: If you want people to listen, you’re going to have to compromise.” But few heard it that way at the time. The Pistols’ only studio album sounds like a rejection of everything rock & roll — and the world itself — had to offer. True, the music was less shocking than Rotten himself, who sang about abortions, anarchy, and hatred on “Bodies” and “Anarchy in the U.K.” But Never Mind the Bollocks is the Sermon on the Mount of U.K. punk — and its echoes are everywhere.
60	59	Otis Redding	Otis Blue/Otis Redding Sings Soul	+119
61	60	Dusty Springfield	Dusty in Memphis	+23	Atlantic, 1969	Born in London, Dusty Springfield was a great soul singer hidden inside a white British pop queen — racking up Motown-style hits such as “I Only Want to Be With You” — when Atlantic producer Jerry Wexler brought her way down South, to Memphis, to make this album. She was so intimidated by the idea of recording with session guys from her favorite Aretha Franklin and Otis Redding hits that she never actually managed to sing a note there. Her vocals were overdubbed later, when the sessions moved to New York. But the result was blazing soul and sexual honesty (“Breakfast in Bed,” “Son of a Preacher Man”) that transcended both race and geography.
62	61	Sonic Youth	Daydream Nation	+110	Enigma, 1988	Sonic Youth took an ecstatic, specifically New York sound created in the late 1970s by the band Television and by composers Rhys Chatham and Glenn Branca, and turned it into an international clamor. On this double album, they make a move away from doomy riddles about pop culture and toward joyful riddles about pop culture. Their unconventional guitar tunings result in jarring chords and overtones, but also an array of gnarled hooks. Thurston Moore’s and Lee Ranaldo’s guitars are like antennae picking up otherworldly signals and channeling them into the scuzzy urban haze of “Teen Age Riot” and “Eric’s Trip,” and on “The Sprawl,” bassist Kim Gordon sums up the album’s measured chaos: “Does ‘Fuck you’ sound simple enough?”
63	62	Prince	Sign 'O' the Times	-17	Paisley Park/Warner Bros., 1987	He’d fired his band, and his 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 didn’t finish.” Here, he finished.
64	63	The Byrds	Sweetheart of the Rodeo	+211	Columbia, 1968	On release, this bold experiment in Nashville classicism was shunned by rock fans and country purists alike. But the American rural song had been central to the Byrds’ folk-rock sound; here, driven by junior Byrd Gram Parsons, the band highlighted that connection, dressing Bob Dylan and Merle Haggard songs in steel guitar and rock & roll drive, setting the stage for country rock. Parsons left signs of his short, glorious future in his originals “Hickory Wind” and “One Hundred Years From Now.”
65	64	Joni Mitchell	Hejira	+69	Asylum, 1976	After redefining the possibilities of singer-songwriter music in the early 1970s, Mitchell set herself an even more ambitious challenge with Hejira, her ultimate jazz-folk statement. Setting her restless-soul visions to slippery instrumentals with help from bassist Jaco Pastorius, she weighed the costs of dedicating her life to fearless self-expression where others might have settled for mere happiness (“Amelia,” “Song for Sharon”). Getting to the point where she could make an album this singularly brilliant might have been a lonely enterprise, but it was worth it for the rest of us.
66	65	Bob Dylan	John Wesley Harding	+272	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, Dylan was defiantly rejecting all the current trends — going his own way, as usual.
67	66	The Replacements	Let It Be	+90	Twin/Tone, 1984	Copping a Beatles title was cheeky; attaching it to a post-punk masterpiece was a sign of maturity. Said Paul Westerberg, “This was the first time I had songs that we arranged, rather than just banging out riffs.” Mixing punk, pop, and country with wry lyrics, his songs describe heroes (the gender-bending couple in “Androgynous”) and villains (an unsanitary dentist in “Tommy Gets His Tonsils Out”; MTV in “Seen Your Video”), and pack in quips about the group’s lack of success (“Fingernails and cigarettes, a lousy dinner”) with swagger and pride. The coup is “Unsatisfied,” a pained howl of unhappiness that forced people to take this ratty band seriously.
68	67	Can	Tago Mago	New in 2023
69	68	Simon & Garfunkel	Bookends	New in 2023
70	69	Sly & the Family Stone	Stand!	+50	Epic, 1969	Stand! is party politics at its most inclusive and exciting — Sly Stone at the top of his funk-rock-soul game. A DJ and producer in San Francisco during the Dawn of Hippie, Stone rides the bonfire momentum of the civil rights movement in motivational-soul sermons such as “Stand!” and “You Can Make It If You Try” without denying the intrinsic divisions that threatened civil war (“Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”). There was also the uplifting pure-pop beauty of “Everyday People” as well as the R&B ecstasy of “I Want to Take You Higher” and the swirling black psychedelia of “Sex Machine.” It makes Stand! a greatest-hits album in all but name.
71	70	Roxy Music	For Your Pleasure	+281	Warner Bros., 1973	Keyboardist Brian Eno’s last album with Roxy Music is the pop equivalent of Ultrasuede: highly stylish, abstract-leaning art rock. The collision of Eno’s and singer Bryan Ferry’s clashing visions gives Pleasure a wild, tense charm — especially on the driving “Editions of You” and “Do the Strand.” The album’s deeply weird centerpiece is “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”: Ferry sings a seductive ballad to an inflatable doll (“I blew up your body, but you blew my mind”), one of the creepiest love songs of all time.
72	71	Hüsker Dü	Zen Arcade	New in 2023
73	72	Al Green	Call Me	+355	Hi, 1973	Green was absolutely fearless at this point, an innovator willing to try any crazy idea — country ballads, jazz chords, even a gospel tune. Producer Willie Mitchell and his studio band of virtuoso Memphis R&B pros create the sultriest grooves south of the Mason-Dixon line. Green testifies to the glories of love in “Call Me” and “Have You Been Making Out O.K.” When he reaches up for that falsetto growl at the end of “Your Love Is Like the Morning Sun,” it’s like he’s bringing down the sugar walls of Jericho.
74	73	Ray Charles	The Genius of Ray Charles	New in 2023
75	74	Kraftwerk	Trans-Europe Express	+164	Kling Klang, 1977	In 1975, someone asked legendary rock critic Lester Bangs where music was going. “It’s being taken over by the Germans and the machines,” he replied. Not a bad prediction. This German group’s sound sought to eliminate the distinction between men and machines. Kraftwerk’s robot-synthesizer grooves influenced electrodisco hitmakers, experimental geniuses such as Brian Eno, and rappers including Afrika Bambaataa, who lifted the title track for “Planet Rock.” The whole world of EDM may not have happened without them.
76	75	Big Star	Third/Sister Lovers	+210	PVC, 1978	Big Star’s first two albums were crisp power-pop full of bright Sixties melodies. Their third album very much wasn’t. The band recorded it, their final LP, in 1974, but it didn’t get released until 1978, in part because singer Alex Chilton sounds like he’s having a nervous breakdown. It’s a record of gorgeous, disjointed heartbreak ballads such as “Take Care,” “Nighttime,” and “Blue Moon.” Even when they’re more optimistic, the songs almost seem to disintegrate as they unfold, finally collapsing into the sublime apocalypse of the album-closing “Kanga Roo.”
77	76	The Jimi Hendrix Experience	Electric Ladyland	New in 2023
78	77	Radiohead	The Bends	+199	Capitol, 1995	If the first half of the Nineties was shaped by Nirvana, the template for the second half was set by Radiohead. The Bends marries a majestic and somber guitar sound to Thom Yorke’s anguished-choirboy vocals. “Fake Plastic Trees” was something of a radio hit, an introspective acoustic ballad of alienation. And not yet shying away from guitar anthems, Radiohead drew on the epic grandeur of U2 and the melancholy of the Smiths in “Nice Dream,” “Just,” and the haunting finale, “Street Spirit (Fade Out).”
79	78	The Rolling Stones	Beggars Banquet	+107	Decca, 1968	“When we had been in the States between 1964 and ’66, I had gathered together this enormous collection of records, but I never had any time to listen to them,” Keith Richards recalled. “In late 1966 and ‘67, I unwrapped them and actually played them.” After the wayward psychedelia of Their Satanic Majesties Request, and with guitarist Brian Jones largely AWOL, Richards’ record collection led the Rolling Stones back to their version of America: country music on “Dear Doctor,” the blues on “Prodigal Son,” and urban riots on “Street Fighting Man.” And “Sympathy for the Devil,” of course, is an anthem for the darkness in every human heart.
80	79	Blondie	Parallel Lines	+67	Chrysalis, 1978	Here’s where punk and New Wave broke through to a mass U.S. audience, thanks to the Number One hit “Heart of Glass,” also known to Blondie fans as “The Disco Song.” “I was trying to get that groove that the drummer for the Bee Gees had,” said Blondie drummer Clem Burke, who credited Kraftwerk and the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack as influences on “Heart of Glass.” Parallel Lines is a perfect synthesis of raw punk edge, Sixties-pop smarts, and the cool New Wave glamour that Blondie invented. Debbie Harry, of course, invented a new kind of rock & roll sex appeal that brought New York demimonde style to the mainstream. Madonna was surely watching.
81	80	The Band	The Band	-23	Capitol, 1969	The Band was four-fifths Canadian — drummer Levon Helm was from Arkansas – but their second album was all American. Guitarist Robbie Robertson’s songs vividly evoke the country’s pioneer age — “Across the Great Divide,” “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” — while reflecting the state of the nation in the 1960s. The Band’s long life on the road resonates in the brawn of Garth Hudson’s keyboards and Helm’s juke-joint attack. But Robertson’s stories truly live in Helm’s growl, Rick Danko’s high tenor, and Richard Manuel’s spectral croon. “Somebody once said he had a tear in his voice,” Helm said of Manuel. “Richard had one of the richest textured voices I’d ever heard.”
82	81	Bruce Springsteen	Nebraska	+69	Columbia, 1982	Recorded on a four-track in Springsteen’s bedroom, Nebraska’s songs were stark, spooky acoustic demos that he decided to release “bare,” packed with hard-luck tales of underdogs. “I wanted black bedtime stories,” he said in his memoir, and he wrote the LP under the influence of John Lee Hooker and Robert Johnson, but also Flannery O’Connor and James M. Cain, creating a cross between the blues and pulp-noir novels. “Down here it’s just winners and losers,” he sings in “Atlantic City,” and these 10 songs live on the wrong side of that line. Yet, Springsteen ends the album with “Reason to Believe,” one of those songs where his search for faith inspires faith itself.
83	82	Neil Young & Crazy Horse	Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere	New in 2023
84	83	Stevie Wonder	Talking Book	-24	Tamla/Motown, 1972	“I don’t think you know where I’m coming from,” Wonder warned Motown executives in 1971. “I don’t think you can understand it.” Indeed, the two albums Wonder released in 1972 — Music of My Mind and Talking Book — rewrote the rules of the Motown hit factory. Talking Book was full of introspection and social commentary, with Wonder producing, writing, and playing most of the instruments himself. “Superstition” and “You Are the Sunshine of My Life” were Number One singles; “Big Brother” is political consciousness draped in a light melody: “You’ve killed all our leaders/I don’t even have to do nothin’ to you/You’ll cause your own country to fall.”
85	84	Tom Waits	Rain Dogs	+273	Island, 1985	“I like weird, ludicrous things,” Tom Waits once said. That understatement plays out most clearly on Rain Dogs, his finest portrait of the tragic kingdom of the streets. Self-producing his music for the first time and recording in his native Los Angeles, he went for a sound he described as “kind of an interaction between Appalachia and Nigeria.” Waits abandoned his signature grungy minimalism on the gorgeous “Downtown Train” (later a hit for Rod Stewart) and gets backing by Keith Richards on “Big Black Mariah.”
86	85	Van Morrison	Moondance	+35	Warner Bros., 1970	“That was the type of band I dig,” Van Morrison said of the Moondance sessions. “Two horns and a rhythm section — they’re the type of bands that I like best.” Morrison took that soul-band lineup and blended it with jazz, blues, poetry, and vivid memories of his Irish childhood, until songs such as “And It Stoned Me” and “Caravan” felt like lucid dreams. In the title hit, Morrison turns the words over and over in his mouth, not scatting so much as searching for the sound of magic. “Into the Mystic” serves as an apt summary: To listen to the album is to get your passport stamped for Morrison’s world of ecstatic visions.
87	86	My Bloody Valentine	Loveless	-13	Sire, 1991	This vague, shimmering, gorgeous album reportedly cost as much as $500,000 to make and nearly bankrupted the band’s U.K. label. It was worth it. Forget the lyrics, which are buried in the mix and incomprehensible, and focus on Kevin Shields’ and Bilinda Butcher’s guitars, which build entire noise symphonies out of tremolo effects and pitch bending. Highlights like “Only Shallow” and “I Only Said” use sampling technology to build a distorted, shifting sound that is wholly original and ecstatically beautiful. It’s like being serenaded by ghosts. Generations of shoegaze bands were born in its shadow.
88	87	Gram Parsons	Grievous Angel	New in 2023
89	88	David Bowie	Station to Station	-36	RCA, 1976	The title track is where David Bowie proclaims himself the Thin White Duke. Thin he was: Station to Station was recorded in a blizzard of cocaine in Los Angeles, with Bowie subsisting on green peppers and milk and almost never sleeping. The manic mood fueled an album that was futuristic but accessible, “plastic soul” speeding toward the electronic epiphanies of his Berlin phase. “TVC 15” is New Orleans R&B as robotic funk; “Golden Years” is James Brown from outer space, with Bowie’s amazing falsetto; and the 10-minute title track summed up his constant sense of motion at the time — opening with the sound of a train coming and eventually exploding into a Euro-disco breakdown that sounds like Saturday Night Fever at the android factory.
90	89	Todd Rundgren	Something/Anything?	+307	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.
91	90	Pink Floyd	The Piper at the Gates of Dawn	+163	EMI/Columbia, 1967	“I’m full of dust and guitars,” Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett told Rolling Stone. Here’s what that sounded like. The band’s debut is all playful, psychedelic imagery and acid guitars. “Astronomy Domine” shows the group’s pop side; “Interstellar Overdrive” shows its spacier freakouts. Released at the height of the Summer of Love, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn sums up the headlong feeling of the moment just as aptly as the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper.
92	91	Joni Mitchell	The Hissing of Summer Lawns	+167	Asylum, 1975	Joni Mitchell got deeper into glamorous L.A. groove theory on her seventh album, reveling in the possibilities of pure melody for a set of songs where her genius as a producer shines just as brightly as her writing. “In France They Kiss on Main Street” bids farewell to the rock & roll era in a blaze of freewheeling, jazzy joy; “Harry’s House/Centerpiece” frames a story of a loveless high-society marriage in supper-club swank. The rest of the pop world would take years to catch up to where she was here.
93	92	Gang of Four	Entertainment!	+181	Warner Bros., 1979	Formed in 1977, Gang of Four combined Marxist politics with punk rock. They played staccato guitar-driven funk, and the stiff, jerky aggression of songs such as “Damaged Goods” and “I Found That Essence Rare” invented a new style that influenced bands from the Minutemen to LCD Soundsystem to agit-rappers Run the Jewels, who sampled Entertainment!’s “Ether.” Even when they’re barking at you about the capitalist commodification of desire, they never sound like dogmatic grad students because the songs bite so hard.
94	93	Kate Bush	Hounds of Love	-25	EMI, 1985	Kate Bush was an avant-garde auteur as well as beloved English pop star. Her New Wave masterpiece Hounds of Love is one of the greatest examples of an artist enjoying Top 40 success while luxuriating in her own eccentricities. Playing a futurist Fairlight CMI synthesizer and singing in an ecstatic operatic chirp, she muses about Freudian psychology, career challenges, love and family, dreaming sheep, and waking witches. Side One had hits like “Running Up That Hill” and “Cloudbusting”; Side Two was an epic “story suite,” moving from goth terror to sci-fi abstraction to dark rustic revelry. It’s no wonder Björk, Florence Welch, and Mitski are just a few of the artists who’ve been swept up in Bush’s sensual world.
95	94	Minutemen	Double Nickels on the Dime	+173	SST, 1984	“Our band could be your life,” sing the Minutemen on “History Lesson – Part 2,” and never did a lyric better articulate punk’s everyman aesthetic. Guitarist D. Boon and bassist Mike Watt push each other to fast, funny, and agitated heights; they sing about everything from Vietnam to Michael Jackson, and cover CCR and Steely Dan, expanding their magnum opus double LP out to 46 songs. Sadly, Boon would die a year later in a van accident.
96	95	P.J. Harvey	Rid of Me	New in 2023	Island, 1993	“I very much wanted to write songs that shocked,” Polly Jean Harvey said years after releasing her second album. The shock came partly from her lyrics, which were often proclamations of sexual compulsion, and also from the intense dynamic shifts in her music, which careen from blues to goth, often in the space of one song. Harvey was under the influence of Howlin’ Wolf, Tom Waits, and Flannery O’Connor, and her singing, writing, and lead-guitar playing coalesce into something marked by flames. The lyrics have lots of licking, moaning, bleeding, stroking, open mouths, and dismembered body parts. The songs spew viscera as they build to a sticky ecstasy.
97	96	The Kinks	The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society	+288	Reprise, 1969	While their British Invasion peers— the Beatles, the Stones, the Who — were getting psychedelic, Ray Davies took his band for a pastoral retreat, with witty portraits of quaint English small-town life fading away like “Big Sky.” Nobody bought it, but Village Green went on to become one of the Kinks’ most influential statements. “With ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ we were saying, ‘We’re here, we’re gonna grab you,’” Davies told Rolling Stone. “The music on Village Green says, ‘Come find us.’”
98	97	Talking Heads	Fear of Music	New in 2023
99	98	Lou Reed	Transformer	+11	RCA, 1972	David Bowie counted the former Velvet Underground leader as a major inspiration — and paid back the debt by producing Transformer. The album had glam flash courtesy of Ziggy Stardust guitarist Mick Ronson as well as Reed’s biggest hit, “Walk on the Wild Side” — which brought drag queens and hustlers into the Top 20 — and the exquisite ballad “Perfect Day.” It was Reed’s first producer, VU impresario Andy Warhol, who inspired the lead cut when he suggested “Vicious” as a song title. “You know, like, ‘Vicious/You hit me with a flower,’” Warhol elaborated. Reed took him at his word, penning the song and cribbing the lines verbatim.
100	99	James Brown	Live at the Apollo	-34	King, 1963	This may be the greatest live album ever recorded: from the breathless buildup of the spoken intro through terse, sweat-soaked early hits such as “Try Me” and “Think” into 11 minutes of the raw ballad “Lost Someone.” It climaxes with a frenzied nine-song medley, and ends with “Night Train.” Live at the Apollo is pure, uncut soul — and it almost didn’t happen. James Brown defied King Records boss Syd Nathan’s opposition to a live album by arranging to record a show himself — on October 24th, 1962, the last date of a run at Harlem’s Apollo Theater. His intuition proved correct; Live at the Apollo, the first of four albums Brown recorded there, charted for 66 weeks.
101	100	Public Image Ltd.	Metal Box	New in 2023
102	101	Leonard Cohen	Songs of Leonard Cohen	+94	Columbia, 1967	Leonard Cohen was already well into his thirties when he made his debut, in the Summer of Love. The Montreal poet had been publishing his books to literary acclaim for years, but he took to songwriting, with his acoustic guitar and the orchestrations of producer John Simon. These were the late-night ballads that made his legend, starting with “Suzanne” and “Sisters of Mercy.” But Cohen specialized in farewells, blowing kisses to his muses in “So Long, Marianne” and “Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye.” He kept writing brilliant songs into his eighties, right up to his death in 2016.
103	102	Neil Young	On the Beach	+209	Reprise, 1974	Reeling from the losses that sparked Tonight’s the Night the previous year, Neil Young shelved that album for a while and made this one instead: a wild fireball of anger (“Revolution Blues”), nihilism (“For the Turnstiles”), and tentative optimism (“Walk On”). The album peaks on Side Two, a stoned symphony of grieving whose three songs (“On the Beach,” “Motion Pictures,” “Ambulance Blues”) are among the most emotionally real in Young’s catalog.
104	103	Pixies	Doolittle	+38	4AD/Elektra, 1989	The Pixies’ second full-length album proved that noisy, arty college rock could be just as fun as anything else on MTV. With his antic vocal style and free-associative lyrics, singer-guitarist Black Francis seemed detached from humanity, but the rest of the Pixies grounded him. Bassist Kim Deal adds tart harmonies that feel like sarcastic asides, drummer David Lovering powers the loud-quiet-loud dynamic that influenced Nirvana and many others, and guitarist Joey Santiago tosses out concise, buzzing riffs. The Pixies’ second album is loaded: With “Debaser,” “Here Comes Your Man,” “Monkey Gone to Heaven,” “Hey,” and “Gouge Away,” it’s the college-radio version of a greatest-hits album.
105	104	Yo La Tengo	I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One	+319	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.
106	105	Prince	Dirty Mind	+221	Warner Bros., 1980	A mix of slinky funk, synth-driven rock, jittery pop, and sexual innuendo, Dirty Mind was Prince’s first great album, even if it only hinted at where he was headed. “White, black, Puerto Rican, everybody just a freakin’,” he sang on “Uptown,” a utopian ode to the Minneapolis club scene. The album includes the world’s merriest done-me-wrong song, “When You Were Mine,” and the incest ditty “Sister.” “I wasn’t being deliberately provocative,” Prince said. “I was being deliberately me.”
107	106	Eminem	The Marshall Mathers LP	+39	Interscope, 2000	Chris Rock joked that the world was so crazy, “the best rapper is a white guy,” referring to Eminem. He’d been accused of corrupting the nation’s youth by fostering misogyny on his major-label debut, and to say he doubled down on playing with offensive ideas only exaggerates his joyful commitment to earning more denunciations. “The Real Slim Shady” and “Bitch Please II” vaulted Eminem from a shock rapper with a sense of humor to the voice of a generation. And in “Stan,” he created a verb and a meme to describe extreme fandom in our era.
108	107	Love	Da Capo	New in 2023
109	108	David Bowie	Hunky Dory	-20	RCA, 1971	David Bowie, then 24, arrived at the Hunky Dory cover shoot with a book of photographs of Marlene Dietrich: a perfect metaphor for this album’s visionary blend of gay camp, flashy rock guitar, and saloon-piano balladry. Bowie marked the polar ends of his artistic ambitions with tribute songs to Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol. In “Oh! You Pretty Things,” “Quicksand,” and “Changes” he invented and perfected a new style of rock & roll glamour. On “Life on Mars?” he sings to all the weirdos like himself, who feel like aliens on Earth. Soon an entire army of kids would attempt to remake themselves in his spangled image, proving his point.
110	109	Derek and the Dominos	Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs	+117	Atco, 1970	Eric Clapton was tired of stardom, so he formed a new band where he could be just another one of the lads. But there was no mistaking the blues guitar on “Layla,” as Clapton sang about falling in love with the wife of his best friend, George Harrison. The tortured love songs on Layla get a kick from guest Duane Allman, whose interplay with Clapton in “Key to the Highway” and “Have You Ever Loved a Woman” is both harmonious and fiercely competitive: electric, brotherly love.
111	110	Elton John	Goodbye Yellow Brick Road	+2	MCA, 1973	Elton John compared this double album to the Beatles’ White Album, and why not? He was by this point the most consistent hitmaker since the Fab Four, and soon enough he would be recording with John Lennon. Everything about Goodbye Yellow Brick Road was supersonically huge, from the Wagnerian-opera-like combo of “Funeral for a Friend” and “Love Lies Bleeding” to the electric boots and mohair suit of “Bennie and the Jets.” “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” was strutting rock & roll, “Candle in the Wind” paid tribute to Marilyn Monroe (and later, Princess Diana), and the title track harnessed the fantastical imagery of glam to a Gershwin-sweet melody.
112	111	X	Wild Gift	New in 2023
113	112	Paul McCartney & Wings	Band on the Run	New in 2023
114	113	The Byrds	Younger Than Yesterday	New in 2023
115	114	Curtis Mayfield	Curtis	+161	Curtom, 1970	In the late Sixties, Curtis Mayfield fronted the Impressions, masters of doo-wop soul with a knack for hiding bracing political commentary inside honeyed harmonies. His biting, tender solo debut proved he was lethal as a lone wolf, able to write complex, sprawling, intricate soul music: “Move On Up,” a persistence mantra; “The Makings of You,” impossibly lavish; and “(Don’t Worry) If There Is a Hell Below, We’re All Going to Go,” a damning indictment of societal dysfunction that still stings today.
116	115	Pere Ubu	The Modern Dance	New in 2023
117	116	Nick Drake	Pink Moon	+87	Island, 1979	Nick Drake recorded his last album in a couple of nights, mailed the tapes to Island Records, and checked himself into a psychiatric ward. If the music were as dark as the lyrics, it might be unlistenable. But Drake’s soothing vocals and unadorned acoustic picking unfold with supernatural tenderness. Few heard Pink Moon when it was released, but its stark beauty has touched the intimate bedroom folk of Cat Power, Elliott Smith, and many others.
118	117	Devo	Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!	+135	Warner Bros., 1978	They came from Akron, Ohio, wore matching jumpsuits, and had a sinister theory of devolution. Their debut album runs on rubber-punk energy and mechanized New Wave beats, with a robotic, soul-chilling version of the Stones’ “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” demented highlights like the troublingly catchy “Mongoloid,” and the Chuck Berry parody “Come Back Jonee.” Devo never got slowed down by their concept; “Gut Feeling/(Slap Your Mammy)” is warped Midwestern guitar mania at its finest.
119	118	Bob Marley & the Wailers	Catch a Fire	+22	Island, 1973	This was the album that introduced the whole world to Bob Marley, expanding his audience beyond Jamaica without diluting his bedrock reggae power. At the time, the Wailers were truly a unified band, fronted by three extraordinary singers in Marley, Peter Tosh, and Bunny Livingston. The rhythm section of drummer Carlton Barrett and his brother, bassist Aston “Family Man” Barrett, defined the reggae beat. Producer and label boss Chris Blackwell subtly overdubbed and remixed the original Jamaican sessions for international ears, but the Wailers’ ghetto rage comes across uncut in “Concrete Jungle” and “Slave Driver.”
120	119	Big Star	Radio City	+240	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.
121	120	Funkadelic	Maggot Brain	+16	Westbound, 1971	“Play like your mama just died,” bandleader/genius George Clinton said to guitarist Eddie Hazel. That morose instruction worked; nothing has ever sounded like the 10 minutes of anguished, fuzzed-up blues Hazel plays on the title song. (Clinton likened the playing to “a silver web.”) Clinton was a funk surrealist and a provocateur, but he’d also been in a doo-wop group and had written songs for Motown — he balanced multicolored futurism with old-school R&B chops on the swinging “Can You Get to That,” the psychedelic “You and Your Folks, Me and My Folks,” and “Super Stupid,” another showcase for Hazel’s dense, distorted riffing. As Clinton later asked defiantly, “Who says a funk band can’t play rock?”
122	121	Frank Zappa & the Mothers of Invention	We're Only in It for the Money	New in 2023
123	122	John Coltrane	A Love Supreme	-56	Impulse!, 1965	Two important things happened to John Coltrane in 1957: The saxophonist left Miles Davis’ employ to join Thelonious Monk’s band and hit new heights in extended, ecstatic soloing. Coltrane also kicked his heroin addiction, a vital step in a religious awakening that climaxed with this legendary album-long hymn of praise. The indelible four-note theme of the first movement, “Acknowledgment,” is the humble foundation of the suite. But Coltrane’s majestic, often violent blowing (famously described as “sheets of sound”) is never self-aggrandizing. Coltrane soars with nothing but gratitude and joy. You can’t help but go with him.
124	123	Beastie Boys	Paul's Boutique	+2	Capitol, 1989	“I went to this party in Los Angeles,” recalled Adam Horovitz, “and they were playing this music, like … four breakbeat records playing at the same time.” The party soundtrack consisted of tracks by the Dust Brothers, who ended up co-producing this entire second record from the Beasties, providing the rap trio with some of the best samples ever put on wax, including the Ramones, Mountain, and the Funky 4 Plus 1. Paul’s Boutique is also an extended goof on Abbey Road [see No. 5], which was Paul McCartney’s boutique — and like that record, it ambitiously stitches together song fragments in a way rarely heard before or since.
125	124	Jay-Z	The Blueprint	-74	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.”
126	125	Lucinda Williams	Car Wheels on a Gravel Road	-27	Mercury, 1998	It took three torturous years to finish, but it was worth it; there are no bad songs on this alt-country masterwork. The title track is one of Williams’ best: Over guitars that owe more to the Stones than to the Opry, she tells a story about the rootlessness of American life. Williams, who was born in Louisiana, describes the South in a loving, fearful tone (“Broken down shacks, engine parts” in one song, “Busted-down doors and borrowed cash” in another) and mourns pals who fell prey to hard liquor, drugs, or dreams of stardom. With production help from Roy Bittan of the E Street Band and a lot of twangy power chords, Williams rocks hard enough to give these troubled songs both dignity and a feeling of release.
127	126	Roxy Music	Roxy Music	New in 2023
128	127	The Ramones	Ramones	-80
129	128	Frank Sinatra	Songs for Swingin' Lovers!	New in 2023
130	129	Bruce Springsteen	The Wild, the Innocent & the E Street Shuffle	+216	Columbia, 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.
131	130	Tim Buckley	Happy Sad	New in 2023
132	131	Black Sabbath	Paranoid	+8	Vertigo, 1970	If you think Ozzy’s enduring fame is impressive, try taking a time machine back to the early Seventies and telling rock critics they’ll still be writing about Paranoid 50 years after its release. But Sabbath ruled for bummed-out kids in the Seventies, and nearly every heavy-metal and extreme rock band of the past three decades — from Metallica to Nirvana to Mastodon — owes a debt of worship to Tony Iommi’s crushing, granite-fuzz guitar chords, the Visigoth rhythm machine of Bill Ward and Geezer Butler, and Ozzy Osbourne’s agonized bray in “Paranoid,” “Iron Man,” and “War Pigs.”
133	132	The B-52's	The B-52's	+66	Warner Bros., 1979	The debut by the B-52’s sounds like a bunch of high school friends cramming all their running jokes, goofy sounds, and private nicknames into a New Wave record. “We never thought it would get past our circle of friends in Athens [Georgia],” vocalist Fred Schneider told Rolling Stone. It turned out that nobody could resist the band’s campy, arty funk, or the eccentric squeals and bouffant hairdos of Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson. (Playing organ, Pierson also defined the band’s sound.) They played toy instruments, and their thrift-store image was as inventive and colorful as their music — which, with “Rock Lobster,” was pretty inventive and colorful.
134	133	The Stooges	Raw Power	New in 2023
135	134	The Beatles	A Hard Day's Night	+129	United Artists, 1964	This soundtrack to the Richard Lester film cemented all that U.S. listeners had heard about the Beatles’ genius in the off-kilter beauty of John Lennon’s “If I Fell” and the rockabilly bounce of Paul McCartney’s “Can’t Buy Me Love.” It was their first album of all-original material, showcasing leaps in their songwriting as well as new tricks like George Harrison’s 12-string guitar, picked up on tour in America, and the Dylanesque harmonica blast that opens “I Should Have Known Better.”
136	135	Sleater-Kinney	Dig Me Out	+54	Kill Rock Stars, 1997	“I wanna be your Joey Ramone,” Corin Tucker promised on Sleater-Kinney’s 1996 album, Call the Doctor. Their next record made good on that mythic ambition. When drummer Janet Weiss joined singer-guitarists Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, a riot-grrrl force of nature became one of the world’s most potent rock bands. Tucker’s indelible vibrato takes off with avenging-angel ferocity on songs like the almost impossibly explosive title track and “Words and Guitar,” an awe-inspiring statement of rock & roll’s power to transform a broken world.
137	136	Led Zeppelin	Physical Graffiti	+8	Swan Song, 1975	The last great Led Zeppelin album is — like most 1970s double LPs — a bloated beast. But its self-indulgent swagger is the very unifying thing that makes it so much fun — and one of the heaviest records of the Seventies. Physical Graffiti is the ultimate in Zeppelin’s attempts to fuse East and West, exploring the Arabic and Indian sonorities of “Kashmir” and “In the Light.” It’s Zeppelin’s most eclectic album, featuring down-and-dirty blues (“Black Country Woman,” “Boogie With Stu”), pop balladry (“Down by the Seaside”), metal riffs (“The Wanton Song”), and the 11-minute “In My Time of Dying.” An excessive album from the group that all but invented excess.
138	137	George Harrison	All Things Must Pass	+231	Apple, 1970	After the end of the Beatles, the Quiet One suddenly looked like the one best prepared for the solo life. After years of writing in the shadow of John Lennon and Paul McCartney, George Harrison had enough songs saved up to make his solo debut a triple album, featuring friends like Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Ringo Starr. All Things Must Pass is full of spiritual guitar quests like “Isn’t It a Pity” and “My Sweet Lord,” the first Number One hit to include a Hare Krishna chant.
139	138	Ornette Coleman	The Shape of Jazz to Come	+279	Atlantic, 1959	Ornette Coleman’s sound was so out there, one audience at an early gig threw his tenor sax over a cliff. He switched to alto and pioneered free jazz: no chords, no harmony, any player can take the lead. It’s still a jarring sound to encounter for the first time, but Coleman’s freedom was grounded in the cathartic release of the gospel and blues of his native Texas. On his first album for Atlantic Records, his music can be just as lyrical as it is demanding, particularly on the haunting “Lonely Woman.”
140	139	R.E.M.	Automatic for the People	-43	Warner Bros., 1992	“It doesn’t sound a whole lot like us,” warned guitarist Peter Buck. But by stripping back their sound to a spare, largely acoustic essence, the college-rock kings made the most powerful album of their career — an argument for sweetness and softness in an increasingly hard world. The bold sonic change-up laid bare Michael Stipe’s keening baritone and expansive vocal melodies, accentuated in several songs by Led Zeppelin member John Paul Jones’ gorgeous string arrangements. The album “was beautiful. It was quiet,” Stipe said. “It flew in the face of everything that was going down musically at the time.” At a time when grunge angst ruled, songs like “Everybody Hurts” and the lovely “Find the River” offered solace.
141	140	Pink Floyd	Wish You Were Here	+124	Columbia, 1975	For the follow-up to Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd got even darker, exploring their main themes of lunacy and alienation. The poignant title ballad is a lament for their ex-bandmate Syd Barrett, one of the Sixties’ saddest acid casualties. They pay tribute in “Shine On You Crazy Diamond,” a 26-minute, nine-part suite that both opens and closes the album, with David Gilmour’s elegiac guitar. They also skewer the music business in “Have a Cigar” and “Welcome to the Machine.”
142	141	The Notorious B.I.G.	Ready to Die	-119	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.” But it was Biggie’s gift of gab, enormous personality, and sense of humor that made Ready to Die so wonderful — whether he was offering a 360-degree vision of the mean streets of Fort Greene on “Things Done Changed,” kicking it Bonnie and Clyde-style on “Me and My Bitch,” or delivering rags-to-riches brags like “Birthdays was the worst days/Now we sip champagne when we’re thirsty.” In the process, he changed rap forever. He ends the album with the dark prophecy of “Suicidal Thoughts.” As with Kurt Cobain, his tragic death while still in his twenties will always leave us wondering how far he might have gone.
143	142	N.W.A	Straight Outta Compton	-72	Ruthless, 1988	N.W.A’s debut brought West Coast gangsta rap to Middle America and changed hip-hop forever. It was the launching pad for the careers of Ice Cube, Eazy-E, and Dr. Dre. “Back then we was calling it ‘reality rap,’” Ice Cube told Rolling Stone years later. “‘Gangsta rap’ is the name that the media coined.” Ice Cube’s rage and Dr. Dre’s police-siren street beats combined for a truly fearsome sound on “Express Yourself” and “Straight Outta Compton.” But it was the protest track “Fuck Tha Police” that earned the crew its biggest honor: a threatening letter from the FBI.
144	143	Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds	Murder Ballads	New in 2023
145	144	Jackson Browne	Late for the Sky	New in 2023
146	145	Portishead	Dummy	-14	Go! Beat, 1994	It’s difficult to sustain, over an entire album, something as vague as ambiance, but Portishead did it on their debut. Along with fellow Bristol, England, innovators Massive Attack, they headed up the trendy mid-Nineties trip-hop movement. Long after the genre petered out, their debut remains immersive and haunting, built on skittering break beats, jazzy samples, spare arrangements, and discomforting pauses. But it’s singer Beth Gibbon’s brooding, pop-cabaret vocals that make it feel classic, hinting at real pain below trip-hop’s stoned exterior. The result was cinematic enough to recall John Barry’s lustrous scores for James Bond films.
147	146	Björk	Homogenic	+56	Elektra, 1997	Björk’s third album was a departure from the fun, playful electronics of her mid-Nineties solo sets Debut and Post, adopting a more uniform, chilly, and distinctly Icelandic sound in its fusion of trip-hop with neo-classical strings. “Jóga,” with its stratosphere-high vocals and beats inspired by volcanic eruptions, may be Björk’s signature song, but it’s only one sample of the album’s palette, jagged and luminescent like broken stained glass. The sheer beauty underneath its boldness and abrasion has enraptured countless artists, from Thom Yorke to Arca, in the years since its release.
148	147	Charles Mingus	The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady	New in 2023
149	148	Liz Phair	Exile in Guyville	-92	Matador, 1993	“Watch how fast they run to the flame,” Liz Phair sang, and true to that promise her debut double LP set the underground on fire. Phair and co-producer Brad Wood built off the bedroom demo intimacy of Phair’s Girly-Sound cassette releases, creating a loose response record to the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street (“I had a lot to say on the subject matter they put forth,” she told Rolling Stone). Her strikingly frank sex talk caused a media stir unheard of for a “low-fi” artitst, but it was the caffeinated drive of songs like “6’1” and “Never Said,” the painterly sonic impressionism of the piano piece “Canary” or the sunset majestic “Stratford-On-Guy,” and the real hurt and hunger of “Fuck and Run” and “Divorce Song” that made Exile hit home.
150	149	Run-D.M.C.	Raising Hell	New in 2023	Profile, 1986	Working for the first time with producer Rick Rubin, the Hollis, Queens, crew of Run, DMC, and Jam Master Jay made an album so undeniable, it forced the mainstream to cross over to hip-hop. “Peter Piper” kicked the rhymes over a jingling cowbell sampled from an old jazz-fusion record. On “My Adidas,” “It’s Tricky,” and “You Be Illin’,” Run and DMC talked trash while the DJ made their day. They even hit MTV with a vandalistic remake of Aerosmith’s “Walk This Way,” featuring Steven Tyler and Joe Perry.
151	150	Guided by Voices	Bee Thousand	New in 2023
152	151	The Jesus and Mary Chain	Psychocandy	New in 2023
153	152	Miles Davis	Bitches Brew	-65	Columbia, 1970	In February 1969, Miles Davis recorded In a Silent Way, a bold step into ambient funk and electric futurism. Then just six months later, he was back in the studio, driven by his desire to assemble “the best damn rock & roll band in the world.” The idea was to connect his music to the audience of Jimi Hendrix and Sly Stone. The result was this double album of jazz-rock fusion, cut in three days of on-the-spot improvisations with an electric orchestra that included three keyboardists, three drummers, two bassists, saxophonist Wayne Shorter, and guitarist John McLaughlin. The music was full of visceral thrills and the brooding darkness Davis brought to everything he touched.
154	153	Elliott Smith	Either/Or	+63	Kill Rock Stars, 1997	Elliott Smith had ambitions to make records with a Beatlesque sound — but zero interest in Beatlesque fame — when he recorded Either/Or. While he achieved his dreams on several subsequent major-label releases, the Portland, Oregon, indie-folk singer-songwriter’s third album resonates because of his low-fi whisper and gritty, sepia-toned lyrics. His songs struck a nerve well beyond the Northwest music scene — Madonna, of all people, covered the morosely pretty drunk’s lullaby “Between the Bars.”
155	154	The Kinks	Something Else by the Kinks	+324	Pye, 1968	Something Else was a commercial flop that nearly killed the band, but it shows off Ray Davies’ genius for writing about the secret lives of everyday people. “Waterloo Sunset” is a gorgeously chilly ballad about a lonely man watching lovers from his window; “Two Sisters” celebrates a housewife dancing around her house with curlers in her hair. He’s got poetic compassion for all these characters, even as he witnesses their private pain in “No Return,” “Afternoon Tea,” and “End of the Season.”
156	155	Joni Mitchell	Court and Spark	-45	Asylum, 1974	Joni Mitchell followed up Blue with the underrated For the Roses, a set of harmonically and lyrically complex songs. Court and Spark is, in comparison, smoother and more straight-ahead; it became the biggest record of her career, hitting Number Two. Working with saxophonist Tom Scott’s fusion group, L.A. Express, Mitchell settled into a folk-pop-jazz groove that remains a landmark of breezy sophistication, particularly on the Top 10 single “Help Me.” Strange but true: A cover of “Twisted,” by the scat-jazz vocal group Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross, closes the album — with stoner comics Cheech and Chong singing backup.
157	156	AC/DC	Back in Black	-72	Atlantic, 1980	In the middle of album rehearsals, singer Bon Scott went on a drinking spree; he choked on his vomit and was found dead in the back seat of a car. After two days of mourning, guitarist Malcolm Young thought, “Well, fuck this, I’m not gonna sit around mopin’ all fuckin’ year.” He called his brother, guitarist Angus Young, and they went back to work with replacement vocalist Brian Johnson. The resulting album has the relentless logic of a sledgehammer. Back in Black remains the purest distillation of hard rock: “Hells Bells,” “You Shook Me All Night Long,” and the title track have all become enduring anthems of strutting blues-based guitar.
158	157	Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers	Damn the Torpedoes	+74	Backstreet, 1979	With hair like Jagger’s and a voice like Dylan’s in tune, Tom Petty and his bar band defrilled classic rock: In 1979, he filed for bankruptcy; then Torpedoes took off, mostly because “Here Comes My Girl” seemed to keep the promises those like Jagger et al., forgot they’d made. Perfectly produced by future music-industry megamogul Jimmy Iovine, Torpedoes gave bright jangling Sixties rock a sheen that made pretty much everything else on AOR radio seem lumpy and stiff, while Petty’s obvious authenticity kept the music from ever seeming calculated or overly polished.
159	158	Iggy Pop	Lust for Life	New in 2023
160	159	The Doors	The Doors	-73	Elektra, 1967	After blowing minds as the house band at the Whisky-a-Go-Go, where they were fired for playing the Oedipal drama “The End,” the Doors were ready to unleash their organ-driven rock on the world. “On each song, we had tried every possible arrangement,” drummer John Densmore said, “so we felt the whole album was tight.” “Break on Through (To the Other Side),” “Twentieth Century Fox,” and “Crystal Ship” are pop-art lighting for Top 40 attention spans. But the Doors hit pay dirt by editing one of their jam songs for airplay: “Light My Fire,” written by guitarist Robbie Krieger, after Jim Morrison told everybody in the band to write a song with universal imagery.
161	160	Beck	Odelay	+264	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.”
162	161	The Zombies	Odessey and Oracle	+82	Date, 1968	The Zombies broke up two weeks after they completed Odessey and Oracle, in December 1967, and the album wasn’t released in the U.S. until 1969. But its baroque psychedelic-pop arrangements continue to exert a powerful influence, particularly on whimsy-loving indie rockers. Recorded in London at both Abbey Road and a Stones haunt, Olympic Studios, Odessey combined the adventure of Sgt. Pepper with the concision of British Invasion pop. And “Time of the Season” went on to become a Number Three hit.
163	162	Neutral Milk Hotel	In the Aeroplane Over the Sea	+214	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.
164	163	Cream	Disraeli Gears	+7	Reaction, 1967	Of all Cream’s studio albums, Disraeli Gears is the sharpest and most linear. The power trio focused their instrumental explorations into colorful pop songs: “Strange Brew” (slinky funk), “Dance the Night Away” (trippy jangle), “Tales of Brave Ulysses” (a wah-wah freakout that Eric Clapton wrote with Martin Sharp, who created the kaleidoscopic cover art). The hit “Sunshine of Your Love” nearly didn’t make it onto the record; the band had trouble nailing it until famed Atlantic Records engineer Tom Dowd suggested that Ginger Baker try a Native American tribal beat, a simple adjustment that locked the song into place.
165	164	Sam Cooke	Live at the Harlem Square Club, 1963	+76	RCA, 1985	Sam Cooke was elegance and soul personified, but he works this Florida club until it’s hotter than hell, all while sounding like he never breaks a sweat. He croons and strokes “For Sentimental Reasons” like a superlover, and when the crowd sings along with him, it’s magic. RCA Records originally shelved the album out of fear that Cooke’s raw performance might alienate crossover (read: white) audiences. When it was finally released more than 20 years after he recorded, Live at the Harlem Square Club gave many fans a whole new perspective of his greatness.
166	165	De La Soul	3 Feet High and Rising	-62	Tommy Boy, 1989	Long Island high school friends Posdnuos, Trugoy, and Maseo linked up with Stetsasonic DJ Prince Paul to create a left-field hip-hop masterpiece, heralding a “D.A.I.S.Y. Age” and weaving samples of Steely Dan, Malcolm McLaren, and Johnny Cash with raps about everything from Public Enemy-style politics (“Ghetto Thang”) to individualism (“Take It Off”) to body odor (“A Little Bit of Soap”). “There was no plan back then,” Trugoy told Rolling Stone in 2009. Indeed, De La Soul’s anything-goes spirit sparked generations of oddballs to rise up and get theirs.
167	166	Aretha Franklin	I Never Loved a Man the Way I Love You	-153	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 storefront-church makeover of Otis Redding’s “Respect,” which became Franklin’s first Number One pop single, prompting Redding to exclaim, “I just lost my song.” Soon, it would be the new marching anthem of the women’s and civil rights movements. “Women did, and still do, need equal rights,” Franklin said decades later. “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 attempted that landmark song. Never Loved a Man began an unparalleled run of classic albums for Franklin; it’s the sound of the Queen of Soul claiming her crown.
168	167	The Pretenders	Pretenders	-15	Sire, 1980	After years of knocking around Ohio and England, writing record reviews and hanging with the Sex Pistols, Chrissie Hynde put together a band as tough as her attitude. The Pretenders’ debut is filled with no-nonsense New Wave rock such as “Mystery Achievement” — plus a cover of “Stop Your Sobbing,” by the Kinks’ Ray Davies (three years later, the father of Hynde’s child). The biggest hit was “Brass in Pocket,” a song of ambition and seduction. Hynde, however, wasn’t so sure about the song’s success. “I was embarrassed by it,” she said. “I hated it so much that if I was in Woolworth’s and they started playing it, I’d have to run out of the store.”
169	168	Buzzcocks	Singles Going Steady	+82	I.R.S., 1979	Some punks wanted to smash the state. The Buzzcocks just wanted to find someone to love, and if you didn’t return their intense affection, watch out (check the jilted tantrum “Oh Shit!”). Singles collects eight British 45s into a perfect punk album. This Manchester group took the sound of the Ramones and made it jittery and even faster. Songs such as “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays” define a world of permanently frustrated punk desire.
170	169	Moby Grape	Moby Grape	New in 2023
171	170	Led Zeppelin	Led Zeppelin	-69	Atlantic, 1969	On their first album, Led Zeppelin were still in the process of inventing their own sound, moving on from the heavy rave-ups of guitarist Jimmy Page’s previous band, the Yardbirds. But from the beginning, Zeppelin had the astonishing fusion of Page’s lyrical guitar playing and Robert Plant’s paint-peeling love-hound yowl. “We were learning what got us off most and what got people off most,” said Plant. Yet the template for everything Zeppelin achieved in the 1970s is here: brutal rock (“Communication Breakdown”), thundering power balladry (“Your Time Is Gonna Come”), and acid-flavored folk blues (“Babe I’m Gonna Leave You”).
172	171	Dr. Dre	The Chronic	-134	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.
173	172	Wilco	Yankee Hotel Foxtrot	+53	Nonesuch, 2001	When Reprise Records refused to release Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, Wilco posted it for free on the internet. Two-hundred-thousand downloads later, Nonesuch Records (owned by the same company as Reprise) released the album, and it became critical and commercial gold. Its pretty acoustic-guitar melodies battled noise, skidded into dissonance, or got chopped off abruptly. Its lyrics pitted hope against doubt, with all bets off. “You have to learn how to die,” crooned Jeff Tweedy, “if you wanna … be alive.”
174	173	Big Brother & the Holding Company	Cheap Thrills	+199	Columbia, 1968	After Big Brother’s performance at the Monterey Pop Festival made Janis Joplin a star, fans were heatedly expecting a live album from them. But their in-the-red loudness and sloppy performances meant they had to cut their second album in a New York studio, with crowd noise added in later. “We’re just a sloppy group of street freaks,” Joplin said. But these San Francisco acid rockers were the most simpatico band she ever had, especially when their raw racket backs Joplin up on “Piece of My Heart,” perhaps her greatest recording.
175	174	Creedence Clearwater Revival	Green River	New in 2023
176	175	Björk	Post	New in 2023
177	176	PJ Harvey	To Bring You My Love	New in 2023
178	177	Dire Straits	Dire Straits	New in 2023
179	178	Pulp	Different Class	-16	Island, 1995	Pulp blew up in the Brit-pop scene of the 1990s, yet Jarvis Cocker outclassed all his rivals as a master storyteller and wit. This man was a born rock star in the Bowie mode, striking a pose in his thrift-shop razzmatazz, but with his own sly sense of compassion. On Different Class, he croons his breathy tales of working-class lust, envy, and dread, over the swishy, trash-disco grooves of “Common People” and “Disco 2000.” You can hear the shabby glamour in his voice when he sighs, “I’ve kissed your mother twice/And now I’m working on your dad.” But in the finale, “Bar Italia,” he makes a post-clubbing hangover sound like the most romantic adventure in the world.
180	179	X-Ray Spex	Germfree Adolescents	+175	EMI, 1978	Teenage multiracial London girl Poly Styrene had braces on her teeth and wore Day-Glo rags, screeching anthems like “Oh Bondage! Up Yours!” over saxophone blasts, and chanting, “I am a poseur and I don’t care! I like to make people stare!” X-Ray Spex’s explosive punk-rock debut went criminally unreleased in the U.S., but it became a word-of-mouth cult classic throughout the indie-rock underground in the Eighties and Nineties, influencing Sleater-Kinney, the Beastie Boys, and many others.
181	180	Black Flag	Damaged	+307	SST, 1981	MCA refused to release this album, denouncing it as “immoral” and “anti-parent.” High praise, but Black Flag lived up to it, defining L.A. hardcore punk with Greg Ginn’s violent guitar and the pissed-off scream of Henry Rollins, especially on “TV Party” and “Rise Above,” which came with the timeless smash-the-glass salvo “We are tired of your abuse/Try to stop is but it’s no use.” Punks still listen to Damaged, and parents still hate it.
182	181	The Flying Burrito Brothers	The Gilded Palace of Sin	+281	A&M, 1969	A landmark of country rock — or, as Gram Parsons called it, “cosmic American music.” He and Chris Hillman were a pair of ex-Byrds who’d flown the coop. The Burritos put their poetic twist on hillbilly twang, proudly wearing Nudie suits and bringing in the pedal steel guitar of Sneaky Pete Kleinow. “Boy, I love them,” Bob Dylan told Rolling Stone. “Their record instantly knocked me out.” They sing “Sin City” in high-lonesome two-part harmony, sounding like country boys lost in the decadence of Sixties L.A.; “Wheels” is God-fearing hippie soul.
183	182	Richard Hell & the Voidoids	Blank Generation	New in 2023
184	183	T. Rex	Electric Warrior	+5	Reprise, 1971	“A successful, hit rock & roll record is a spell,” T. Rex leader Marc Bolan told Rolling Stone. And so, muttering “eye of Bowie, toe of Slade,” Bolan cast a spell over all of England. He took his Tolkienesque hippie music and gave it a glammed-out Chuck Berry update on sexy singles like “Bang a Gong (Get It On)”; this was rock that thrusted, quivered, and recklessly employed metaphors equating cars with sex (“You got a hubcap diamond star halo”). He outdid himself with “Jeepster,” an entire song on the topic, vibrating with lust, a shuffling beat, lots of guitar, and the sound of Bolan stomping on the studio floor.
185	184	Patsy Cline	The Ultimate Collection	+45	Universal, 2000	Her career was cut short when she died in a plane crash at 30, but Patsy Cline made her mark as one of country’s great singers. “Even though her style is considered country, her delivery is more like a classic pop singer,” Lucinda Williams has noted. Her hits “Walkin’ After Midnight” and “I Fall to Pieces” also made it to the pop charts, establishing the template for country crossover that pointed the way forward for generations; her version of “Crazy” was a godsend to the song’s struggling writer, a young Willie Nelson.
186	185	Galaxie 500	On Fire	New in 2023
187	186	Isaac Hayes	Hot Buttered Soul	+187	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.
188	187	Madonna	Like a Prayer	+144	Sire, 1989	“I like the challenge of merging art and commerce,” Madonna told Rolling Stone. After dominating Eighties pop without always getting the critical respect she deserved, Madonna finally won artistic recognition with her most personal set of songs, including “Till Death Do Us Part” and “Oh Father.” And she nailed the commerce side with “Express Yourself” and the title track, the video of which had the Vatican talking about blasphemy. “I pray when I’m in trouble or when I’m happy,” she said. “When I feel any sort of extreme.” Like a Prayer fused all of her extremes brilliantly.
189	188	New York Dolls	New York Dolls	+113	Mercury, 1973	“Do you think that you could make it with Frankenstein?” they asked, not kidding. Glammed-out punkers the New York Dolls snatched riffs from Chuck Berry and Fats Domino and fattened them with loads of attitude and reverb. Produced by Todd Rundgren, songs like “Personality Crisis” and “Bad Girl” drip with sleaze and style. “What the Dolls did to be influential on punk was show that anybody could do it,” singer David Johansen said. Indeed, its hard to imagine the Ramones or the Replacements or a thousand other trash-junky bands without them.
190	189	The Specials	The Specials	New in 2023
191	190	Buffalo Springfield	Buffalo Springfield Again	New in 2023
192	191	The Gun Club	Fire of Love	New in 2023
193	192	Pink Floyd	The Wall	-63	Columbia, 1979	Pink Floyd’s most elaborately theatrical album was inspired by their own success: the alienating enormity of their tours after The Dark Side of the Moon [see No. 55], which was when bassist-lyricist Roger Waters first hit upon a wall as a metaphor for isolation and rebellion. He finished a demo of the work by July 1978; the double album then took the band a year to make. Rock’s ultimate self-pity opera, The Wall is also hypnotic in its indulgence: the totalitarian thunder of “In the Flesh?”; the suicidal languor of “Comfortably Numb”; the Brechtian drama of “The Trial.” Rock-star hubris has never been more electrifying.
194	193	Dinosaur Jr.	You're Living All Over Me	New in 2023
195	194	Randy Newman	Good Old Boys	New in 2023
196	195	Hole	Live Through This	-89	Geffen, 1994	One week before Hole’s breakthrough album was released, Kurt Cobain killed himself and made Courtney Love a widow. The media attention that followed guaranteed a close listen for Love’s fearsome songs and her shift from pure riot-grrrl punk to a more stable sound that MTV could embrace. Her coded songs have dark topics, including death (“Kill me pills”), violence (“Pee girl gets the belt”), and body shame (“Bad skin, doll heart”), as well as motherhood. (Cobain and Love became parents two years earlier, and briefly lost custody after she was reported to have used heroin while pregnant.) The horror in Love’s exposed voice on “Asking for It” and “Doll Parts” gives immediacy to her firsthand stories about being an outcast “pee girl.”
197	196	The Raincoats	The Raincoats	+202	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.
198	197	Massive Attack	Blue Lines	+44	Wildbunch/Virgin, 1991	Perhaps the first post-hip-hop masterpiece: Blue Lines combined rap, dub, and soul that gave birth to trip-hop; if you ever found yourself in a “chillout room” in 1995, this album was probably on, and it can still suck you into its gravitational pull. In the U.K., where acid house and jungle were the dominant sounds, its creepingly slow ambiance knocked the music world on its back. “What’s important to us is the pace,” said the band’s 3D, “the weight of the bass and the mood.”
199	198	The Modern Lovers	The Modern Lovers	+90	Beserkley, 1976	Jonathan Richman moved from Boston to New York as a teenager in hopes of sleeping on Lou Reed’s couch. That influence shows on the two-chord anthem “Roadrunner.” Recorded in 1972 but not released until 1976, Lovers turned the tough sounds of the Velvets into an ode to suburban romanticism. “Rock & roll was about stuff that was natural,” Richman said. “I wasn’t about drugs and space.” Songs like “Pablo Picasso,” “Girl Friend,” and “Dignified and Old” touched generations of punk and indie-rock innocents.
200	199	The Allman Brothers Band	At Fillmore East	New in 2023	Capricorn, 1971	Although this double album is the perfect testimony to the Allman Brothers’ improvisational skills, it is also evidence of their unprecedented connection with the crowds at New York’s Fillmore East. “The audience would kind of play along with us,” singer-organist Gregg Allman said of those March 1971 shows. “They were right on top of every single vibration coming from the stage.” The guitar team of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts was at its peak, seamlessly fusing blues and jazz in “Whipping Post” and “In Memory of Elizabeth Reed.” But their telepathy was cut short: Just three months after the album’s release, Duane died in a motorcycle accident.
201	200	Kanye West	My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy	-183	Roc-A-Fella, 2010	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 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 John played on “All of the Lights,” and “Power” sampled prog-rockers King Crimson. West’s sense of his own grandiose ambitions bordered on the comical; during the writing process for the nine-minute “Runaway,” he famously told guest rapper Pusha T to add “more douchebag” to his verses. The resulting track opened with just a single, eerie piano note before building into a mountainous, anarchic tune that incorporated everything from a Rick James sample to a vocoder that evoked Robert Fripp’s guitar playing on Brian Eno albums. The sonic overkill was lavish, but the record hit so hard because he mixed megalomania with introspect; “You been puttin’ up wit’ my shit just way too long,” he rapped on “Runaway.” West later called Dark Fantasy an apology record.” Perhaps. In any case, that wisdom has proved fleeting.
202	201	Pixies	Surfer Rosa	+189	4AD, 1988	The brainy Boston quartet went up against punk producer Steve Albini for one of the era’s most influential rock sounds: all razor-blade guitars and drum thud. It became the sound of the Nineties, as everyone from Nirvana to PJ Harvey went to Albini, hoping to get the raw power of Surfer Rosa. Black Francis goes from a whisper to a scream in oddities like “Bone Machine,” “River Euphrates,” and “Where Is My Mind?” But bassist (and future Breeder) Kim Deal steals the show with her cheeky Midwest vocals in “Gigantic.”
203	202	Arcade Fire	Funeral	+298	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.
204	203	LCD Soundsystem	Sound of Silver	+230	DFA/Capitol, 2007	James Murphy had proven his kung fu as the most badass electro-punk producer in clubland. But not even fierce fans dreamed he’d make a masterpiece like Sound of Silver. Every track sounded like a different band’s greatest hit, from the political punk goof “North American Scum” to the synth-pop breakup lament “Someone Great.” The song for the ages was “All My Friends,” huge, sweeping, ferociously emotional, with disco keyboards and rock guitars pulsing as Murphy looked back on a youth of killer parties and silent mornings.
205	204	The Go-Betweens	16 Lovers Lane	New in 2023
206	205	Dr. John	Gris-Gris	+151	Atco, 1968	Mac Rebennack was a New Orleans piano player on songs for Professor Longhair and Frankie Ford who moved to L.A. in the Sixties, where he played on Phil Spector sessions and encountered California psychedelia. Rechristening himself Dr. John Creaux the Night Tripper, he made this swamp-funk classic. Gris-Gris blends New Orleans R&B, voodoo chants, and chemical inspiration. The groovy Afro-Caribbean percussion and creaky sound effects aren’t just otherworldly — they seem to come from several other worlds all at once.
207	206	D'Angelo	Voodoo	-178	EMI, 2000	In the five years following the release of his 1995 debut, Brown Sugar, D’Angelo grew disillusioned with the genre that had just anointed him a rising star. “I don’t consider myself an R&B 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.”
208	207	Metallica	Master of Puppets	-110	Elektra, 1986	Metallica’s third album has a lyrical theme: manipulation. “It deals pretty much with drugs,” singer-guitarist James Hetfield said. “Instead of you controlling what you’re taking and doing, it’s drugs controlling you.” It also has a sonic theme: really loud guitars, played fast, with no regard for the hair metal that was then dominating the airwaves. When the band slows down on “Welcome Home (Sanitarium),” it just emphasizes the unrelenting nature of the rest of the songs. Recorded during three months in Copenhagen, Master of Puppets was bassist Cliff Burton’s last album with Metallica; he died in September 1986, when the band’s bus crashed.
209	208	Uncle Tupelo	No Depression	New in 2023
210	209	Outkast	Aquemini	-160	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.
211	210	Air	Moon Safari	New in 2023
212	211	Richard & Linda Thompson	I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight	+274	Island, 1974	With Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson was one of the first prominent Sixties folk rockers to look to his native England’s traditions for inspiration. After leaving Fairport, he joined with his wife, Linda Thompson to make stellar albums in the Seventies. Richard played guitar like a Sufi-mystic Neil Young; Linda had the voice of a Celtic Emmylou Harris. Bright Lights is their devastating masterwork of folk-rock dread. Radiohead even picked up some guitar tricks from “The Calvary Cross.”
213	212	The White Stripes	Elephant	+237	V2/XL/Third Man, 2003	The Stripes exploded out of Detroit with a minimalist garage-blues attack: just Jack White on guitar and Meg White on drums, taking on the world. These kids insisted they were a brother and sister, even after people learned they were secretly a divorced couple. But against all odds, the low-budget duo became a global sensation for their sheer rock power. Elephant seethes with raw desperation and lust in “Seven Nation Army,” “Hypnotize,” and “The Hardest Button to Button.” Jack plays guitar hero in the seven-minute jam “Ball and Biscuit.”
214	213	Cheap Trick	In Color	New in 2023
215	214	Traffic	The Low Spark of High Heeled Boys	New in 2023
216	215	Echo & the Bunnymen	Heaven Up Here	New in 2023
217	216	The Stone Roses	The Stone Roses	+103	Silvertone, 1989	For a few glorious moments at the dawn of the Nineties, the Stone Roses looked like they were going to lead another British Invasion, this one of baggy-panted, floppy-haired bands that loved Sixties guitars and rave-y dance beats with the same whimsical fervor. The sound never crossed over here, and the band fell apart — but first they made this incredible album, highlighted by the ecstatic eight-minute-long “I Am the Resurrection.” It laid the foundation for the Brit pop that blew up a few years later.
218	217	Can	Ege Bamyasi	+237	United Artists, 1972	Chugging out of Cologne, Germany, in the late Sixties, avant-psychedelic crew Can took influence from the Velvet Underground’s subterranean drones, Miles Davis’ molten jazz rock, and James Brown’s circular funk grooves. On Ege Bamyasi, new singer Damo Suzuki mumbles, chants, and shrieks his way through engulfing Kraut-boogie workouts like “Vitamin C” and “I’m So Green.” Spoon took their name from the LP’s Doors-meets-Stereolab closing track, and Kanye West sampled the lupine “Sing Swan Swing.”
219	218	Iggy & the Stooges	Raw Power	New in 2023
220	219	Smashing Pumpkins	Siamese Dream	+122	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”).
221	220	50 Cent	Get Rich or Die Tryin'	+60	Interscope, 2002	The backstory — promising street rapper gets shot nine times and lives to make a classic debut — was irresistible. So were the precision-engineered beats and hooks 50 Cent cooked up with his new mentor, Dr. Dre. Through a mixture of melody and menace, 50 enraptured the suburbs with “In da Club” and antagonized an entire generation of his peers on “Many Men.” His hulking figure, physically and metaphorically, loomed over the rap charts for years, teaching a generation of artists that nothing sold like fear itself.
222	221	Peter Gabriel	Peter Gabriel 3: Melt	New in 2023
223	222	ABC	The Lexicon of Love	New in 2023
224	223	Bob Mould	Workbook	New in 2023
225	224	Guns N' Roses	Appetite for Destruction	-162	Geffen, 1987	The biggest-selling debut album of the Eighties, Appetite hit the metal scene like an asteroid, bringing the grit and fury of Seventies rock back to a mainstream hard-rock scene that was starved for something real. Indiana-bred Axl Rose’s five-alarm yowl bowled over listeners. Guitarist Slash gave the band blues emotion and punk energy, while the rhythm section brought the funk on hits such as “Welcome to the Jungle.” When all the elements came together, as in the final two minutes of “Paradise City,” GN’R left all other Eighties metal bands in the dust, and they knew it, too. “A lot of rock bands are too fucking wimpy to have any sentiment or any emotion,” Rose said. “Unless they’re in pain.”
226	225	Violent Femmes	Violent Femmes	New in 2023
227	226	Dexy's Midnight Runners	Searching for the Young Soul Rebels	New in 2023
228	227	Ray Charles	Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music	-100	ABC-Paramount, 1962	Country and soul were deeply entangled Southern traditions and had been cross-pollinating for years. But Modern Sounds was still the audacious boundary smasher its title promised, with Ray Charles applying his gospel grit and luscious soul-pop strings to standards by Hank Williams (“Half as Much,” “You Win Again,” “Hey, Good Lookin’”) and Eddy Arnold, whose lover’s lament “You Don’t Know Me” is recast as a parable about race relations in light of the civil rights struggle. Modern Sounds became the most popular album of Charles’ career and includes the hits “I Can’t Stop Loving You” and “Born to Lose.”
229	228	King Crimson	In the Court of the Crimson King	New in 2023
230	229	PJ Harvey	Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea	+84	Island, 2000	Polly Jean Harvey happy? Album number five found her in New York and in love, crowing “I’m immortal/When I’m with you” in the surging opener, “Big Exit.” Harvey had spent four records howling her sexual obsessions and romantic disappointments over stark postmodern blues. Her guitar attack was still forceful, but softened around the edges by marimba, piano, organ, and guest vocalist Thom Yorke, especially on the garage-y “Good Fortune” and the yearning “A Place Called Home” — mash notes to lovers in the big city.
231	230	My Morning Jacket	Z	New in 2023
232	231	The Feelies	Crazy Rhythms	New in 2023
233	232	Ice Cube	AmeriKKKa's Most Wanted	-45	Priority, 1990	Six months after quitting N.W.A, the group’s most gifted lyricist returned with a vengeance on AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted, recorded with Public Enemy’s production crew, the Bomb Squad. Lyrically, it sharpened N.W.A’s politics; “Why more niggas in the pen than in college?” Cube asks on “The Nigga Ya Love to Hate.” The album’s rapacious sexism has aged horrendously, though give Cube some credit for being smart enough to include the stunning “It’s a Man’s World,” in which female rapper Yo-Yo tells him off straight to his face.
234	233	Graham Parker & the Rumour	Squeezing Out Sparks	New in 2023
235	234	Suicide	Suicide	+264	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.
236	235	Steely Dan	Can't Buy a Thrill	-67	ABC, 1972	Working as hired songwriters by day, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker rehearsed this debut in executives’ offices by night. “We play rock & roll, but we swing,” said Becker. For proof, check the cool lounge-jazz rhythms of “Do It Again” and the hot guitar of “Reelin’ in the Years.” Even florid lead vocalist David Palmer (who the band soon fired) couldn’t damage the sad, stately beauty of “Dirty Work”; on “Brooklyn,” Becker and Fagen wrote the perfect elusive ode to their native borough. Their debut kicked off an amazing run of albums, like 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy and 1974’s Pretzel Logic, that are just as fantastic.
237	236	Belle & Sebastian	If You're Feeling Sinister	+245	Jeepster, 1996	Being a self-pitying shut-in has never sounded better than it does on the Scottish twee icons’ breakthrough. The chamber-folk arrangements are second to none — like a cup of tea brewed for you by a hopeless crush with a really good record collection — but don’t sleep on Stuart Murdoch’s subtly sardonic lyrics on “The Stars of Track and Field” and “Seeing Other People,” which give these wistful-sounding songs a bite that sets them apart from most imitators.
238	237	Cocteau Twins	Heaven or Las Vegas	+8	4AD, 1990	Cocteau Twins were Scot goths who helped invent the dream-pop aesthetic that ruled U.K. indie during the Eighties. Heaven or Las Vegas is their arrestingly beautiful pop peak, despite being released as the band itself was in turmoil, largely brought on by guitarist Robin Guthrie’s drug addiction. Somehow, they created something wholly transporting; Elizabeth Fraser’s celestial soprano works like a vocal Rorschach test, gorgeously floating over Guthrie and Simon Raymonde’s magic-hour instrumentation.
239	238	The Strokes	Is This It	-124	RCA, 2001	Before Is This It even came out, New York’s mod ragamuffins were overnight sensations, jumping from Avenue A to press hysteria and the inevitable backlash, all inside a year. The objective of Is This It, said singer Julian Casablancas, “was to be really cool and non-mainstream, and be really popular.” Recorded literally under the streets of New York, this blast of guitar-combo racket passionately reconciled those seemingly contradictory aspirations, and accomplished both, updating the propulsion of the Velvet Underground and the jangle of Seventies punk with Casablancas’ acidic dispatches mixed to the fore and ringed with distortion like he was singing from a pay phone.
240	239	The Cure	Disintegration	-123	Fiction, 1989	According to the kids on South Park, this is the best album ever made. According to many depressive Eighties-minded kids, it’s the only album ever made. Disintegration was the height of stadium goth rock, with the Cure stretching out for long, spacious wallows like ‘Plainsong” and “Prayers for Rain.” But it also shows off Robert Smith’s stunning pop mastery on “Lovesong,” which Smith wrote as a wedding present for his wife, and the rapturously forlorn “Pictures of You.” On “Fascination Street,” his voice shakes like milk as he makes adolescent angst sound so wonderfully, wonderfully pretty. “I was trying to put in one or two beacons of light in amongst the darkness,” he told Rolling Stone.
241	240	Eric B. & Rakim	Paid in Full	-179	4th & B’way, 1987	Ice-grilled, laid-back, diamond-sharp: Rakim was the Eighties’ greatest rapper, and this album is the record that cemented his legend. Paid in Full was one of the first hip-hop records to fully embrace Seventies funk samples on stone hip-hop classics such as “I Know You Got Soul” and “I Ain’t No Joke.” With a stark, chill declamatory flow that broke from the singsong-y style of most rapping at the time, Rakim moved hip-hop from stories about the world of the hood to ones about the mind (“I start to think and then I sink/Into the paper like I was ink”). Eric B. built the title track out of a luscious sampled bass line, and Rakim recounted days of poverty when he had “nothin’ but sweat inside my hand,” a problem solved by this debut’s platinum success.
242	241	Tom Waits	Swordfishtrombones	New in 2023
243	242	The Pogues	Rum Sodomy & the Lash	New in 2023
244	243	The Police	Synchronicity	-84	A&M, 1983	“I do my best work when I’m in pain and turmoil,” Sting told Rolling Stone. And indeed, the dissolution of his first marriage produced some of his best work, including “King of Pain” and the stalker’s anthem “Every Breath You Take.” There was pain and turmoil in the band, too — it would be the Police’s last album. But it became one of the Eighties’ biggest pop-rock blockbusters, perhaps the finest example of Sting’s unique gift for distilling complex psychological and romantic dramas, which still ruled radio and MTV, while making proggy musicianship and dense composition palatable to the mall-rat masses.
245	244	Blur	Parklife	+194	Food, 1994	Blur improbably burst into the mainstream with Parklife‘s “Girls & Boys,” a five-minute disco-rock barnburner about cross-dressing, bisexual libertines. They also sang about the joys of slacking (“Parklife”) but also how boring it is to conform (“End of the Century”), and they transformed a map of England into a metaphor for surviving rough patches (“This Is a Low”). Frontman Damon Albarn’s gifts for storytelling, singalong melodies, and Anglophilia set up Blur as heirs apparent to the Kinks and fierce rivals to Oasis for Brit pop’s crown.
246	245	Meat Puppets	Meat Puppets II	New in 2023
247	246	Scritti Politti	Cupid & Psyche 85	New in 2023
248	247	Supertramp	Crime of the Century	New in 2023
249	248	Thelonious Monk	Brilliant Corners	New in 2023
250	249	Big Youth	Screaming Target	New in 2023
251	250	The Magnetic Fields	69 Love Songs	+156	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.
252	251	Daft Punk	Discovery	-15	Virgin, 2001	The robot duo from France perfected house music as pop on their 1997 album Homework. For the follow-up, they took electronic dance music to a whole new place, with the vocoder euphoria of “One More Time” and the deep-groove delight “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” where the title is chanted like a mantra at a dystopian corporate retreat. But even the winky moments have heart, like “Digital Love,” where Eighties guitar cheese takes off toward Tomorrowland.
253	252	Oasis	(What's the Story) Morning Glory?	-95	Epic, 1995	With their second album, the fighting Gallagher brothers embraced their Stones and Beatles comparisons, then went ahead and established themselves as a rock & roll force in their own right with barnburners (“Roll With It”) and epic tunes, like the glorious “Wonderwall.” “The whole of the first album is about escape,” Noel Gallagher told Rolling Stone in 1996, of 1994’s Definitely Maybe. “It’s about getting away from the shitty, boring life of Manchester. The first album is about dreaming of being a pop star in a band. The second album is about actually being a pop star in a band.”
254	253	The Impressions	The Impressions' Greatest Hits	New in 2023
255	254	Radiohead	Kid A	-234	Parlophone, 2000	A new, uniquely fearless kind of rock record for a new, increasingly fearful century, Radiohead’s fourth album, released in October 2000, remains one of the more stunning sonic makeovers in music history. The band had the freedom to do whatever it wanted after its 1997 alt-rock breakthrough, OK Computer [see No. 42]. “Everyone expected us to become this U2 type of band, with that stadium credibility,” bassist Colin Greenwood said in 2001. 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 abstract electronics, glitchy beats, and the challenge of free-form composition. “It was difficult for the others [in the band], ’cause when you’re working with a synthesizer it’s like there’s no connection,” Yorke said in 2017. What emerged was at once scary and enveloping, pitched between deep alienation and profound tenderness — from the womblike ambient flow of “Everything in Its Right Place” to the free-jazz implosion “The National Anthem” to the gizmo-groove paranoia of “Idioteque.” “I find it difficult to think of the path we’ve chosen as ‘rock music,’ ” Yorke told Rolling Stone in 2000. “Kid A is like getting a massive eraser out and starting again.”
256	255	ZZ Top	Tres Hombres	New in 2023
257	256	Squeeze	East Side Story	New in 2023
258	257	Brian Eno	Before and After Science	New in 2023
259	258	Quicksilver Messenger Service	Happy Trails	New in 2023
260	259	The Temptations	Anthology	+112	Tamla/Motown, 1973	Indisputably the greatest black vocal group of the modern era, the Temptations embodied Motown, channeling unique individual voices and talents into pristine hits and tight, tuxedoed choreography. This three-album set features masterpiece after masterpiece of chugging, gospel-tinged soul, including “My Girl,” “I Can’t Get Next to You,” and “I Wish It Would Rain,” and later, psychedelic-soul adventures like “Cloud Nine” and the gritty message-song masterpiece “Ball of Confusion.”
261	260	Peter Tosh	Legalize It	New in 2023
262	261	Flying Lotus	Cosmogramma	New in 2023
263	262	The Pharcyde	Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde	+220	Delicious Vinyl, 1992	These high school friends from L.A. were a little like a West Coast answer to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, offering their own spin on alternative hip-hop in the Nineties and showing there was something going on in Southern California beyond G-funk. They rapped about innocent topics, like having a crush on a teacher in “Passin’ Me By,” which was a small hit, but also about dating a cute girl who turns out “to be a John Doe” and run-ins with the cops (the Public Enemy-homage “Officer”). It all came out as bright and refreshing as sorbet.
264	263	Weezer	Weezer (Blue Album)	+31	Geffen, 1994	When it came out, Weezer’s debut was regarded as a quirky power-pop album with a couple of hit singles. The song’s were so catchy that some indie rockers wondered if they were put together by a record company, Monkees-style. But Rivers Cuomo’s band became a major influence on a whole generation of young sad-sack punkers. “People see us now as this credible band, and they assume we always were credible,” says Cuomo. “But, man, we could not have been more hated on when we came out.”
265	264	Loretta Lynn	Coal Miner's Daughter	+176	Decca, 1971	Loretta Lynn crossed over into pop with the autobiographical “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” in which she proudly recalled her meager upbringing amid weepy steel guitar — her mother read the Bible by “coal-oil light,” her dad sold hogs to buy her shoes. That resilient spirit carried over into the Coal Miner’s Daughter LP’s tunes about feeling jilted (“What Makes Me Tick”) and loving another woman’s man (“Any One, Any Worse, Any Where”), and the album, as well as the like-titled memoir and biopic, secured her place as one the most important country singers ever.
266	265	Robyn	Body Talk	-69	Konichiwa, 2010	Robyn had a few Swedish teen-pop hits in the Nineties, but she’s a worldly adult on Body Talk — this was the voice of a woman who knew how it felt to shed tears on the dance floor. She released Body Talk in three mini-album installments on her own Konichiwa label, before cherry-picking the highlights for this epochal feminist disco statement. “Dancing on My Own” became this century’s answer to “I Will Survive.” She told Rolling Stone, “I was pushing through the challenges and getting off on that liberated feeling of being able to explore desperation and passion and frustration and all that.”
267	266	Def Leppard	Pyromania	New in 2023
268	267	Wu-Tang Clan	Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)	-240	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 grounding for the group’s nine members, including future solo stars Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Raekwon, GZA, Ghostface Killah, and Method Man. Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg had established L.A. as the center of hip-hop innovation and daring, but the Wu reclaimed the crown for the music’s birthplace.
269	268	Rufus & Chaka Khan	Ask Rufus	+231	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.
270	269	Neil Diamond	The Bang Years 1966–1968	New in 2023
271	270	Fela Kuti & Africa 70	Expensive Shit	+132	Sounds Workshop, 1975	The 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.
272	271	Shania Twain	Come On Over	+29	Mercury, 1997	Shania Twain’s third album was basically a country Thriller, still the biggest-selling album ever by a female artist. Twain and her husband, AC/DC and Def Leppard producer John “Mutt” Lange, had radio in a hammerlock during the late Nineties with hits like “You’re Still the One” and “Man! I Feel Like a Woman,” and Twain’s mix of genre-defying effervescence and feel-like-a-woman self-assertion helped pave the way for superstar rule breakers like the Dixie Chicks, Miranda Lambert, and Taylor Swift, who said seeing Shania perform inspired her to want to get onstage herself.
273	272	A Tribe Called Quest	The Low End Theory	-229	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 Rape”). Each time Q-Tip rhymes over Carter’s bass lines, the groove just gets deeper.
274	273	The White Stripes	White Blood Cells	New in 2023
275	274	The Slits	Cut	-14	Antilles, 1979	Avant-garde you can dance to — that’s the Slits’ Cut in a nutshell. The British group’s raucous debut took the best of late-Seventies post-punk’s favorite genre influences (dub, girl groups, abstract jazz), tossed them all into a blender, and somehow ended up with joyously anarchic songs like “Shoplifting,” with its awesome catchphrase, “We pay fuck-all!” Kurt Cobain would call “Typical Girls” one of the best songs ever recorded, and we can’t help but agree.
276	275	Radiohead	In Rainbows	+112	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.
277	276	Green Day	Dookie	+99	Reprise, 1994	The album that jump-started the Nineties punk-pop revival. The skittish Dookie was recorded in little more than three weeks, and singer-guitarist Billie Joe Armstrong blazed through all the vocals in two days. “Right from getting the drum sound, everything seemed to click,” their A&R man (and Dookie producer) Rob Cavallo marveled. Indeed, “click” is the operative word here, also describing Armstrong’s airtight, three-minute bowshots like “Welcome to Paradise,” “Basket Case,” and the infectious smash “Longview” — which Armstrong described as “cheap self-therapy from watching too much TV.”
278	277	Billy Joel	The Stranger	-108	Columbia, 1977	On this record, Billy Joel found the recipe for success: a bottle of red, a bottle of white, and a sharp eye for the local color of New York street life. The Piano Man sharpens his storytelling gifts with a Scorsese-style sense of humor and compassion, whether he’s singing about a down-and-out Little Italy hustler in “Movin’ Out (Anthony’s Song),” the femme fatale in “She’s Always a Woman,” or the doomed Long Island greaser couple Brenda and Eddie in “Scenes From an Italian Restaurant.” Meanwhile, Joel hit the pop charts with the Grammy-winning “Just the Way You Are” (written for his first wife and manager, Elizabeth), which became a wedding-band standard.
279	278	Can	Future Days	New in 2023
280	279	George Michael	Faith	-128	Columbia, 1987	As the main singer and writer in the 1980s British pop band Wham!, George Michael paraded around in sleeveless mesh shirts and Fila short-shorts. Wham! songs were smarter than they appeared, and when Michael went solo to prove what he could do, he nailed it on the first try, integrating R&B in his songwriting, from soul ballads (“Father Figure,” “One More Try”) to horny Prince-inspired funk (“I Want Your Sex,” “Hard Day”). The album sold 25 million copies worldwide, and four singles went to Number One in the U.S. “You either see pop music as a contemporary art form, or you don’t. I do, very strongly,” Michael said.
281	280	The Isley Brothers	3 + 3	+184	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.
282	281	Brian Wilson	Smile	+118	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.
283	282	The Fall	This Nation's Saving Grace	New in 2023
284	283	Jefferson Airplane	Surrealistic Pillow	+188	RCA, 1967	Psychedelic scholars have long tried to pin down just what the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia did on this album (besides contribute some guitar playing) to earn a credit as “spiritual adviser.” But the real trip is the Airplane’s hallucinatory distillation of folk-blues vocals, garage-rock guitar, and crisp pop songwriting. Grace Slick’s vocal showcases — “White Rabbit” and “Somebody to Love” — made Surrealistic Pillow a commercial smash during San Francisco’s Summer of Love, and Marty Balin’s spectral “Today” is still the greatest ballad of that city’s glory days.
285	284	EPMD	Strictly Business	New in 2023
286	285	Rod Stewart	Every Picture Tells a Story	-108	Mercury, 1971	“We had no preconceived ideas of what we were going to do,” Rod Stewart said. “We would have a few drinks and strum away and play.” With a first-class band of drinking buddies (including guitarist Ron Wood and drummer Mickey Waller), Stewart made a loose, warm, compassionate album, rocking hard with mostly acoustic instruments. “Mandolin Wind” was his moving ballad of a country couple toughing out a long winter on the farm; the title tune was a hilarious goof. But Stewart scored his first Number One hit with “Maggie May,” his autobiographical tale of a young stud getting kicked in the head by an older lady.
287	286	Todd Rundgren	A Wizard, a True Star	New in 2023
288	287	Primal Scream	Screamadelica	+150	Sire, 1991	Primal Scream was a run-of-the-mill U.K. alt-rock band who discovered rave culture, overdosed on acid-house music, and retrofitted their sound with the fun, trippy, druggy disco-rock diversions on Screamadelica. The single “Loaded,” their first U.K. hit, combined house piano, folk melodies, and a danceable beat, while “Movin’ On Up,” their U.S. breakthrough, drew from hippie-folk strumming, gospel choruses, and Stones-y guitar and tambourine. Sure, some of Screamadelica feels like meandering mood music, but that’s proof that sometimes the journey is more fun than the destination.
289	288	The Ronettes	Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes	+206	Philles, 1964	More a Spanish Harlem street gang than a girl group, the Ronettes were pop goddesses dressed as Catholic schoolgirls gone to hell and back. Phil Spector builds his Wall of Sound as his teen protégée (and future wife) Ronnie Spector belts “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain,” while songs like “I Wonder” and “Baby, I Love You” ache with hope for a perfect love that always seems to be impossibly ideal and just within arm’s reach.
290	289	Brian Eno	Here Come the Warm Jets	+19	Island, 1974	The former Roxy Music keyboardist’s first solo album pioneered a new kind of glammy art rock: jagged, free-form, and dreamy, sounding like nothing else in rock at the time. “Baby’s on Fire” and “Needles in the Camel’s Eye” are vicious rockers with detached vocals, and Robert Fripp’s warped guitars swarm and stutter, while “On Some Faraway Beach” and the title track are glistening slo-mo-drone pastorales. “I called it ‘warm jet guitar’ because it sounded like a tuned jet,” Eno said later.
291	290	Fiona Apple	When the Pawn...	-182	Epic, 1999	Following the success of her precocious debut, Tidal, and saddled with a pop audience that didn’t quite know what to do with her, Fiona Apple took her critics to task on the mature yet daring When the Pawn … Backed by her expressive piano playing and impressionistic production from Jon Brion, Apple makes resentment seem almost fun on songs like “Fast as You Can,” “Paper Bag,” and “The Way Things Are.” In years to come, Apple would make peace with her outcast status, leaving far behind the MTV-generation gatekeepers who once gave her so much grief. For generations of young fans, the raw, hard-won triumph of When the Pawn … will always feel timeless.
292	291	Grateful Dead	Anthem of the Sun	New in 2023
293	292	Junior Murvin	Police and Thieves	New in 2023
294	293	Suicide	Suicide	+205	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.
295	294	Burial	Untrue	New in 2023
296	295	Coldplay	A Rush of Blood to the Head	+29	Capitol, 2002	In the early 2000s, starry-eyed Brit-pop boys doing a cuddly version of Radiohead were a dime a dozen. (Remember Starsailor?) It was Coldplay’s second album that showed they were true contenders. Songs like “Green Eyes” and “The Scientist” brought back the comforting melodies of “Yellow,” but the twinkling sonics suggested prime Smiths or U2. And darker stuff, like the austerely beautiful death meditation “Amsterdam” and the OK Computer-worthy “God Put a Smile Upon Your Face,” showed the group had more than arena anthems on its mind.
297	296	Diana Ross & the Supremes	Anthology	+156	Tamla/Motown, 1974	In the heyday of Motown, the Supremes were their own hit factory, all glamour and heartbreak. Diana Ross and her girls ruled the radio with tunes from the Motown brain trust of Holland, Dozier, and Holland. The Supremes could blaze with confidence, as in “Come See About Me.” Or they could sound elegantly morose, as in “My World Is Empty Without You” and “Where Did Our Love Go?” But in “Love Is Like an Itching in My Heart,” when Miss Ross gulps, “There ain’t nothing I can do about it,” it’s a spine-tingling moment.
298	297	ABBA	The Definitive Collection	+6	Universal, 2001	These Swedish pop stars became the world’s biggest group in the 1970s, with a streak of Nordic despair under the sparkly melodies. Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad were the bewitching frontwomen in the sequined pantsuits; their husbands, Björn Ulvaeus and Benny Andersson, wrote global hits like the joyful “Dancing Queen,” the double-divorce drama “Knowing Me, Knowing You,” and the haunting farewell “Thank You for the Music.”
299	298	Donald Fagen	The Nightfly	New in 2023
300	299	Ghostface Killah	Supreme Clientele	+104	Epic, 2000	“I feel like I got my whole style from Ghostface,” Kanye West has said. Lavishly unhinged and viciously hard-hitting, Ghostface Killah’s second solo album helped revive the Wu-Tang franchise, marinating lines like “Ghost is back, stretch Cadillacs, fruit cocktails/Hit the shelves at Paul’s pastry rack,” in serrated Seventies-soul samples. On “Nutmeg” he drops a mind-boxing cluster of psychedelic bullshit, then simply stands back during the chorus, letting the tape roll as he mocks all comers — an untouchable champ at the top of his game.
301	300	Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force	Planet Rock: The Album	New in 2023
302	301	Parquet Courts	Wide Awake!	New in 2023
303	302	The Fugees	The Score	-168
304	303	Ween	Chocolate and Cheese	New in 2023
305	304	Amy Winehouse	Back to Black	-271	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.
306	305	OutKast	Speakerboxxx/The Love Below	-15	LaFace, 2003	For a decade, OutKast were a duo defined by dichotomies — regional versus celestial, order amid chaos, blackness and the universal. On their fifth studio album, that tension could no longer be contained on one CD. Big Boi’s verbal funk overflowed on Speakerboxxx, his half of the double-disc set, while André 3000’s inner crooner exhaled like never before on The Love Below. It was a gamble to break up their twin alchemy this way, but in dividing themselves, OutKast conquered: America fell as deeply in love with the borderless pop bliss of “Hey Ya!” as it did with the slick talk and soulful horns on “The Way You Move.”
307	306	Dolly Parton	Coat of Many Colors	-49	RCA, 1971	Dolly Parton’s starkest, most affecting album. The title track is about wearing rags but keeping your pride. “That was a very sad and cutting memory that I long kept deep within myself,” she said of the song in a 1977 Rolling Stone interview. “I remembered all the pain of it and the mockery.” The rest is more hard country: On “Traveling Man,” Parton’s mom runs off with the singer’s boyfriend; on “If I Lose My Mind,” her boyfriend has sex with another woman in front of her.
308	307	The Shangri-Las	Leader of the Pack	New in 2023
309	308	Motörhead	Ace of Spades	+100	Bronze, 1980	Neither punk nor metal, Motörhead played rock & roll nastier, grittier, and snarlier than their forebears on Ace of Spades. Amid a miasma of hypercharged guitar riffs and death-rattle drumming, frontman Lemmy Kilmister, splits his time between sleazy come-ons (“Love Me Like a Reptile”), war stories (“(We Are) The Road Crew”), and underdog maxims (“Live to Win”). The blazing title track epitomized the Motörhead experience: “You know I’m born to lose, and gambling’s for fools,” Lemmy growls, “but that’s the way I like it, baby, I don’t wanna live forever.” He meant it, too.
310	309	Aphex Twin	Selected Ambient Works 85-92	New in 2023
311	310	Bon Iver	For Emma, Forever Ago	+151
312	311	John Prine	John Prine	-162	Atlantic, 1971	When John Prine resigned from his job as a USPS mailman, his supervisor snickered, “You’ll be back.” Instead, Prine became a revered folk-country-rock songwriter, starting with this first album, which is loaded with enduring gems, including “Angel From Montgomery,” “Hello in There,” and a song that regularly returns to relevance, “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore.” Prine seemed like a Zen sage. He filled his songs with an uncynical live-and-let-live morality, and wrote in a colloquial voice that showed a love of the way Americans speak. His closest parallel isn’t another songwriter, it’s Mark Twain.
313	312	Vampire Weekend	Modern Vampires of the City	+16	XL, 2013	On Halloween 2012, with their hometown New York subsumed in a blackout, Vampire Weekend went on late-night TV to play an atheist reggae jam called “Unbelievers” dressed as skeletons. It was the perfect introduction to Modern Vampires of the City, a record that darkened their buoyant indie pop, as Ezra Koenig sang about moving beyond his post-college years into something scarier and weirder — hitting a cloudy peak with the beautifully worried Dylanesque travelogue “Hannah Hunt.”
314	313	The Flaming Lips	The Soft Bulletin	New in 2023
315	314	Faust	Faust IV	New in 2023
316	315	Kid Cudi	Man on the Moon: The End of Day	+144	Dream 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.
317	316	Lou Reed	Berlin	New in 2023
318	317	Solange	When I Get Home	New in 2023
319	318	The Streets	Original Pirate Material	New in 2023
320	319	Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young	Déjà Vu	-99	Epic, 1970	Neil Young was just getting his solo career underway when he joined his old Buffalo Springfield bandmate Stephen Stills, ex-Byrd David Crosby, and former Hollie Graham Nash in the first of the West Coast supergroups. Young’s vision and guitar transformed the earlier folk-rock CSN into a rock & roll powerhouse. The CSNY combination was too volatile to last, but on their best album, they offered pop idealism (Nash’s “Teach Your Children”), militant blues (Crosby’s “Almost Cut My Hair”), and vocal-choir gallop (Stills’ “Carry On”).
321	320	M.I.A.	Kala	New in 2023
322	321	The Weeknd	House of Balloons	New in 2023
323	322	Johnny Cash	At Folsom Prison	-158	Columbia, 1968	By the late Sixties, Cash was ignored by country radio and struggling for a comeback. At Folsom Prison was a million-seller that reignited his career. A year later, he was writing liner notes for Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline and logging four weeks at Number One with his second prison album, At San Quentin. But Folsom Prison is essential Cash. Backed by a tough touring band, including fellow Sun Records alum Carl Perkins on guitar, Cash guffaws his way through “Cocaine Blues,” “25 Minutes to Go” (a countdown to an execution), and “Folsom Prison Blues,” with its line about shooting a man just to watch him die. The 2,000 inmates in attendance roar their approval.
324	323	Spiritualized	Ladies and Gentlemen We Are Floating in Space	New in 2023
325	324	Madvillain	Madvillainy	+41	Stones Throw, 2004	This collaboration between rapper MF Doom and producer Madlib is one of underground hip-hop’s greatest moments. Madlib provides a shifting bed of warped funk and wildly unpredictable samples, drawing on everything from Thunder and Lightning’s “Bumpin’ Bus Stop” to “The Theme of the Justice League of America.” Doom’s rhymes are so casually adventurous that sometimes it takes a second to notice how stunning they are: “Still back in the game like Jack LaLanne/Think you know the name, don’t rack your brain/On a fast track to half sane” — hell yeah!
326	325	Maxwell	Urban Hang Suite	New in 2023
327	326	Animal Collective	Merriweather Post Pavilion	New in 2023
328	327	Toots & the Maytals	Funky Kingston	+17	Island, 1973	Loose, funky, and exuberant, Kingston is the quintessential document of Jamaica’s greatest act after Bob Marley. Showcasing some of the Maytals’ best songs (“Pressure Drop,” later covered by the Clash) and borrowing from soul, pop, and gospel, Funky Kingston introduced the world to the great Toots Hibbert. He performs versions of “Louie Louie” and, in a down-home surprise, John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” with Toots changing the lyrics from “West Virginia” to “West Jamaica.”
329	328	The Human League	Dare	New in 2023
330	329	Yes	Close to the Edge	+116	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.
331	330	The Congos	Heart of the Congos	New in 2023
332	331	Pet Shop Boys	Actually	+104	EMI Manhattan,, 1987	Neil Tennant was one of England’s best-known music journalists when he formed this Eighties synth-pop duo with Chris Lowe. The Pet Shop Boys scored a Number One smash with “West End Girls,” their ode to queer cruising. But they took their satirical wit even further on Actually — perhaps the only album on this list where the singer is yawning on the cover. The Boys dissect the sex-and-money connection in “Rent,” “Shopping,” and the Dusty Springfield duet, “What Have I Done to Deserve This?”
333	332	Erykah Badu	Baduizm	-243	Kedar, 1997	“If the head wrap was my trademark, the drums, African drums, were my soundtrack,” Erykah Badu recalled. “It’s just who I was at the time, and I wanted to be completely who I was when I did what I did.” Recorded between New York, Philadelphia, and her hometown of Dallas, the singer’s debut suggested a Billie Holiday raised on hip-hop and Stevie Wonder, celebrating herself and her heritage over resplendently relaxed grooves. Baduizm’s Seventies-meets-Nineties vibe, Badu’s exquisite lyricism (“On & On” is at once spiritual, apocalyptic, and funny), and jazz-steeped cadences (see “Appletree”) combined to make the 25-year-old singer a figurehead for the neo-soul genre that essentially began with this album.
334	333	Disco Inferno	D.I. Go Pop	New in 2023
335	334	ESG	Come Away with ESG	New in 2023
336	335	The Sonics	Here Are the Sonics	New in 2023
337	336	Alice Coltrane	Journey in Satchidananda	New in 2023	Impulse!, 1971	Alice Coltrane was a key part of her husband John’s fiery late-era bands. You can hear her own musical voice in full flower on this LP, named for her spiritual teacher Swami Satchidananda. Coltrane blended the sprawling modal jams pioneered by her late husband with drones from the Indian tanpura, Pharoah Sanders’ spiraling soprano sax, and her own rapturous harp. The result is a meditative bliss-out like jazz had never seen: part earthy blues and part ethereal mantra, and a potent influence on sonic seekers from Radiohead to Coltrane’s grandnephew Flying Lotus.
338	337	TLC	CrazySexyCool	-119	LaFace, 1994	Things were not well with TLC during the making of CrazySexyCool: Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes was lighting fires, and the group was in a financial slide that would end in bankruptcy proceedings. But they emerged with the most effervescent and soulful R&B pop anyone had heard since the Supremes. “Creep” is hard-edged but cute, the summery “Diggin’ on You” is almost pastoral in its intimate flow, and the transcendent “Waterfalls” may be the greatest song ever about how it’s not a great idea to go after your dreams.
339	338	Tame Impala	Lonerism	New in 2023
340	339	M.I.A.	Arular	+82	Interscope, 2005	What’s the opposite of a girl next door? Perhaps it might be a radicalized, globalized pop star like M.I.A., an English-Tamil writer who provocatively questioned and deconstructed ideas about power and rebellion throughout her first album. She raps and cajoles in hard-chopping cadences (“I bongo with my lingo,” indeed), and mixes jokes, disses, and political insight about the abuse of authority over electronic beats that can sound like New York City electroclash or Brazilian funk. And her hipster hit “Galang” hit as hard as any hip-hop around at the time.
341	340	Dwight Yoakam	Guitars, Cadillacs, Etc., Etc.	New in 2023
342	341	Snoop Doggy Dogg	Doggystyle	-1	Death Row/Interscope, 1993	Until Snoop Dogg came along, no one in rap — and hardly anyone in rock — realized that an aloof whisper could be more intimidating than a shout. Snoop never gets heated; he takes the same tone when he’s menacing a cop as he does with a woman who’s soaping his back in the tub. Emanuel Dean and Dr. Dre’s sterling G-funk productions on “Gin N Juice” and “Who Am I (What’s My Name)?” ensured enormous album sales for the D-O-double-G’s debut and his laidbaaaack Indo-flavored tales of life on the streets of Compton.
343	342	Depeche Mode	Violator	-175	Sire, 1990	One of England’s first synth-pop bands, Depeche Mode had moved beyond their bubblegum phase by the time of their seventh album and, under the influence of hip-hop, began playing with samples and loops, even betraying their keyboard roots with the twangy guitar that opens “Personal Jesus.” Alan Wilder created the dense, constantly shifting arrangements, Martin Gore wrote the pervy lyrics, and Dave Gahan croons implacably about betrayal, immorality, and sexual domination. The percolating “Enjoy the Silence” became their only U.S. Top 10 single, and “Policy of Truth” did almost as well. With its panoply of high-gloss hooks and arresting, artificial sounds, Violator cemented Depeche Mode’s status as the first electronic band that could fill stadiums.
344	343	Jane's Addiction	Nothing's Shocking	New in 2023
345	344	Mobb Deep	The Infamous	+25	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.
346	345	Santana	Santana	New in 2023
347	346	John Cale	Paris 1919	New in 2023
348	347	Notorious B.I.G.	Life After Death	-168	Bad Boy, 1997	Biggie’s second album was a victory lap following the immense, earth-shaking success of his 1994 debut, Ready to Die, and was prophetically and tragically released less than a month after the 24-year-old was shot and killed. The rubber-grooved “Hypnotize” was already on its way to becoming a smash when he died, and his lyrical genius and gift for narrative were on display all over this two-CD set, as he grapples with rap-game politics and delivers thinly veiled knocks at the West Coasters he long beefed with over clean, lush-sounding production. He was just getting started.
349	348	The Feelies	The Good Earth	New in 2023
350	349	Frank Ocean	Channel Orange	-201	Def Jam, 2012	On Channel Orange, Frank Ocean became one of music’s most elusive superstars — shy about speaking in public, impossible to pin down musically. He emerged from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, writing pop tunes for the likes of Brandy and Justin Bieber. But he stepped into his own avant-soul territory with Channel Orange, his official debut. Soon after coming out of the closet — still a rarity in R&B at the time — Ocean had a hit with the falsetto slow jam “Thinkin Bout You.” He mixes up genres and vocal personae, with guest shots from André 3000 to John Mayer. The peak: the spacey 10-minute suite “Pyramids,” an Egyptian fantasy starring Cleopatra as an around-the-way girl. Years later, Channel Orange still sounds like the future.
351	350	Usher	Confessions	+82	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.
352	351	Janet Jackson	Control	-240	A&M, 1986	If properly, successfully maturing in pop after a childhood in the spotlight is an artform, then Janet Jackson is Michelangelo and Control her statue of David. The youngest member of the Jackson family released her third studio album while on the cusp of her twenties. Working with the dream team of Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, Jackson made an assertive, hook-y, and powerful proclamation of her star power on sparkling, sculpted electro-pop dance songs like “Nasty,” “The Pleasure Principle,” and the title track. Control remains the blueprint for any young artist looking to find their own voice.
353	352	Eagles	Hotel California	-234
354	353	Neneh Cherry	Raw Like Sushi	New in 2023
355	354	OutKast	Stankonia	-290	LaFace, 2000	There’s a thrilling sprawl on OutKast’s fourth album, a sense of limitless possibilities within the boundaries of hip-hop. Big Boi and André 3000 rap about baby mamas’ mamas (“Ms. Jackson”), the perils of sex (“We Luv Deez Hoez”) and alcohol (“?”), feeling excluded from the American dream (“Gasoline Dreams”), good manners (“I’ll Call Before I Come”), and the trauma of teen pregnancy (“Toilet Tisha”). The music is sexy, bold, and hard, mixing, on “B.O.B.,” distorted metal guitar, an HBCU gospel choir, and a jittery techno beat. Big Boi says OutKast is “cooler than a polar bear’s toenails,” adds that they’re “just lyrically twerking,” and tells the police, “Officer, get off us, sir.” “We call it slumadelic,” said André 3000.
356	355	Boogie Down Productions	Criminal Minded	-116	B-Boy, 1987	BDP copped a gangsta stance, sporting guns on the album cover, but they opened their debut with “Poetry,” an ode to the edutaining power of their music — “It takes concentration for fresh communication,” KRS-One informs. DJ Scott LaRock laced funky samples into taut, hard-hitting tracks like the classic interborough beef fests “The Bridge Is Over” and “South Bronx,” the latter doubling as a glorious origin story of hip-hop’s early days. LaRock was killed shortly after the album’s release trying to break up a fight.
357	356	King Sunny Adé	Juju Music	New in 2023
358	357	Missy Elliott	Supa Dupa Fly	New in 2023
359	358	Aerosmith	Rocks	+8	Columbia, 1976	The bad boys from Boston perfected their Seventies guitar raunch on Rocks — it’s the musical equivalent of getting run over by a muscle car. Steven Tyler and Joe Perry sounded like America’s heirs to the Mick-and-Keith tradition with the filthy riffs of “Lick and a Promise” and “Back in the Saddle.” Tyler brings all his dirtbag swagger and gutter poetry to his favorite topic: sex. Surprise peak: “Sick as a Dog,” an incredible fusion of the Byrds, James Brown funk, and Sixties girl-group harmonies.
360	359	Rihanna	Anti	-129	Roc Nation, 2016	After dominating the Top 40 for years, Rihanna wanted to make an ambitious album-statement, brilliantly sustaining the tipsy two-in-the-morning vibe of this moody midcareer reinvention. “I just gravitated toward the songs that were … the things I want to listen to,” she said. “The things that I want to smoke to.” On Anti, she recast pop as her own hazy playground, referencing Dido and hair metal, covering Tame Impala, and merging dancehall and torch ballads.
361	360	Muddy Waters	The Anthology	+123	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.
362	361	Kendrick Lamar	good kid, m.A.A.d city	-246	TDE, 2012	Kendrick Lamar’s hip-hop autobiography came as a shock in 2012: musically downbeat, with a film director’s eye for narrative but the voice of a poet. Good kid is his story of growing up in Compton, surrounded by gunfire, gang warfare, police brutality, drugs, liquor, dead friends — billed on the cover as “A Short FIlm by Kendrick Lamar,” like a West Coast answer to Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets. K-Dot goes for emotional detail instead of gangsta bravado, whether cruising the streets in “Backseat Freestyle” or pondering addiction in “Swimming Pool (Drank).” As he told Rolling Stone, “The best entertainers have to have the most wickedest sense of humor, to be able to take pain and change it into laughter.”
363	362	Harry Nilsson	Nilsson Schmilsson	-81	RCA, 1971	A brilliant outlier on the Seventies L.A. singer-songwriter scene, Harry Nilsson had a voice and pop savvy like Paul McCartney and a biting ironic side like John Lennon. Nilsson Schmilsson produced three hits — the oddball island novelty “Coconut,” a cover of Badfinger’s “Without You,” where Nilsson sounds like a depressed Barry Manilow, and the surprise monster jam “Jump Into the Fire.” Nilsson was later covered by LCD Soundsystem. It was par for the course for a guy who could shruggingly pull off anything he wanted.
364	363	Buddy Holly	The "Chirping" Crickets	New in 2023
365	364	Nas	Illmatic	-320	Columbia, 1994	Other rappers were 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.
366	365	Raekwon	Only Built 4 Cuban Linx...	-146	Loud/RCA, 1995	The finest Wu-Tang solo joint stands out due to Raekwon’s understated, eternally unflustered cool and densely woven verses. Abetted by hyperactive sideman Ghostface and hypnotically stark beats courtesy of the RZA, Raekwon crafts breathtaking drug-rap narratives. On “Knowledge God,” an Italian drug dealer with a “hairy chest” and “many minks” meets his colorful demise in just six words: “Sixteen shots in his fish tank.” It’s the rare hip-hop album that rivals the mob movies it celebrates for gripping detail.
367	366	Manu Chao	Clandestino	+103	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.
368	367	Janelle Monáe	The ArchAndroid	New in 2023
369	368	Throbbing Gristle	20 Jazz Funk Greats	New in 2023
370	369	Dead Kennedys	Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables	New in 2023
371	370	Fugazi	Repeater	New in 2023
372	371	Kanye West	The College Dropout	-297	Roc-A-Fella, 2004	In 2003, Kanye West was a Chicago kid who’d produced some hot beats for Jay-Z, wore pastel polo shirts with the collars popped, and wanted to be on the mic, not behind it. Record labels were skeptical, but West got over on wit and determination; he wrote and sang the hit “Through the Wire” while his jaw was wired shut after being in a car accident, and followed it with more dynamic tracks, including “Slow Jamz,” about the seductive power of soul music, and the gospel riot “Jesus Walks.” West loved Jesus and strip clubs, made arrogant claims about his talent, and then professed his insecurity — which made his music all the richer.
373	372	Weezer	Pinkerton	New in 2023
374	373	Lana Del Rey	Norman Fucking Rockwell!	-52	Polydor/Interscope, 2019	Lana Del Rey became a music-blog sensation playing the poker-faced millennial Nancy Sinatra on her debut single, “Video Games.” She kept growing as an artist, and on her wonderfully titled sixth album perfected her epic vision of doomed, decadent, Seventies-steeped California romance on songs like “Mariner’s Apartment Complex” and the nine-minute crusher “Venice Bitch.” Del Rey dropped references to the Eagles and Graham Nash, merging her own music into the Laurel Canyon canon. No less an authority on Seventies greatness than Elton John called the album’s songs “timeless.”
375	374	Schoolly D	Saturday Night! The Album	New in 2023
376	375	Eurythmics	Touch	New in 2023
377	376	Suede	Suede	New in 2023
378	377	Carly Rae Jepsen	E•MO•TION	New in 2023
379	378	Ornette Coleman	Free Jazz	New in 2023
380	379	Janet Jackson	The Velvet Rope	-61	Virgin, 1997	Janet Jackson left behind her girl-next-door image forever with The Velvet Rope, an album of sexy, confessional, freewheeling hip-hop soul. She fuses Joni Mitchell and Q-Tip in “Got ’Til It’s Gone,” but the shocker is her girl-girl version of Rod Stewart’s “Tonight’s the Night.” “I always write about what’s in my life,” she told Rolling Stone. “I did that on Control, and I did the same thing with this album. It’s kind of like cutting yourself open and exposing yourself to the world, which is really a vulnerable thing.”
381	380	Talk Talk	Laughing Stock	New in 2023
382	381	Pharoah Sanders	Karma	New in 2023
383	382	King Tubby	Meets Rockers Uptown	New in 2023
384	383	Elliott Smith	XO	New in 2023
385	384	The Chemical Brothers	Dig Your Own Hole	New in 2023
386	385	Aaliyah	One in a Million	-71	Blackground/Atlantic, 1996	Aaliyah’s second album was her first with producer Timbaland, and until the singer’s tragic death in 2001, the pair reshaped the landscape of R&B. Aaliyah seems to be sparring with Timbaland’s hide-and-seek drum tracks, ducking and weaving — and, somehow, singing beautifully — as high-hats and shakers zip past her ears. As futuristic as this album sounds, even today, Aaliyah also benefited from her close study of the classics: Her version of the Isley Brothers’ “Choosey Lover” rises to the level of the original.
387	386	Jonathan Richman & the Modern Lovers	Rockin' and Romance	New in 2023
388	387	Queens of the Stone Age	Songs for the Deaf	New in 2023
389	388	War	The World Is a Ghetto	New in 2023
390	389	Gary Numan/Tubeway Army	The Pleasure Principle	New in 2023
391	390	Boston	Boston	New in 2023
392	391	The Mothers of Invention	Freak Out!	New in 2023
393	392	Chic	Risqué	+22	Atlantic, 1979	Nobody thought a disco band was supposed to make a brilliant third album — but Chic always thrived on defying the odds. On Risqué, the dynamic duo of guitarist Nile Rodgers and bassist Bernard Edwards fuse sleek tropical R&B, Anglophile New Wave, and NYC club flash for a sound that’s been the blueprint for pop radio ever since. “Good Times” is Chic’s most prophetic groove — the story of hip-hop on wax begins here, with the Sugarhill Gang rhyming over it for “Rapper’s Delight.”
394	393	2Pac	All Eyez on Me	+43	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.”
395	394	John Fahey	The Transfiguration of Blind Joe Death	New in 2023
396	395	Meat Loaf	Bat Out of Hell	New in 2023
397	396	Bon Iver	Bon Iver	New in 2023
398	397	Can	Soundtracks	New in 2023
399	398	Pantera	Vulgar Display of Power	New in 2023
400	399	Mary J. Blige	My Life	-273	Uptown, 1994	The crucial development on Mary J. Blige’s second album is her emergence as a songwriter; in lyrics and interviews, she began to describe the traumas she’d had, both as a child growing up in the projects and as an adult. For fans, that intimacy turned her from a beloved singer to a member of the family. “Down and out, crying every day,” she sings on the title song. There’s plenty of thematic contrast — the playful bedroom come-on “Mary Jane (All Night Long),” a smashing cover of the 1970s funk ballad “I’m Going Down” — but the strongest impression from the album is that Blige had been through it, and her hopefulness was hard-won.
401	400	Dinosaur	You're Living All Over Me	New in 2023
402	401	Jay-Z	Reasonable Doubt	-334	Roc-A-Fella, 1996	Before there was Jay-Z the mogul, the legend, the Beyoncé boy toy, there was Jay-Z on his do-or-die hustle, trying just to get a seat at the UNO table. “Forever petty minds stay petty/Mine’s thinkin’ longevity, until I’m 70,” he rhymes on the virtuosic “22 Two’s,” his earliest experiment in toying with standard rap structures. When he raps about drug dealing and not trusting women, the details are specific and self-aware. Jay’s charisma and comic insouciance are evident even on small touches like his taunting laugh in the chorus of “Ain’t No Nigga,” a gloriously funky track that lit up dance clubs. Here, he planted a flag in the underground — within two years, the pop hits followed and the hustle went worldwide.
403	402	Tyler, the Creator	Igor	New in 2023
404	403	Misfits	Walk Among Us	New in 2023
405	404	The dB's	Stands for Decibels	New in 2023
406	405	Fela Kuti & Africa 70	Zombie	New in 2023
407	406	The Meters	Look-Ka Py Py	New in 2023	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.
408	407	Mariah Carey	The Emancipation of Mimi	-18	Island, 2005	Mariah Carey’s last couple of albums had only attained platinum status, paltry by her usual high-flying standards. But the vocal acrobat swept away the naysayers with “We Belong Together,” a chattering, heartbroken ballad that interpolates two R&B classics (Bobby Womack’s “If You Think You’re Lonely Now” and the Deele’s “Two Occasions”), then followed that song’s huge success with “Shake It Off,” a dismissive, vengeful cut for all the jilted lovers — and The Emancipation of Mimi turned out to be a sextuple-platinum return to form.
409	408	Bad Bunny	X 100pre	+39	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.
410	409	Adele	21	-272	Columbia, 2011	“Pain is art” may be a cliché, but for Adele, it rang especially true. Her debut album, 19, was a polite, tasteful set of soul-inflected pop. Its follow-up was something else again. Chewing over a tumultuous affair, she dug deep and came up with a modern masterpiece of post-breakup soul music. She’d actually cut an entire album with producer Rick Rubin but wound up preferring earlier demos of songs like “Rolling in the Deep,” “Someone Like You,” and “Set Fire to the Rain,” and mostly used those instead. The switch-up made for an even rawer and more emotional experience that clearly connected: 21 sold more than 30 million copies and swept the 2012 Grammys.
411	410	The Descendents	Milo Goes to College	New in 2023
412	411	Nicki Minaj	The Pinkprint	New in 2023
413	412	Soundgarden	Superunknown	New in 2023
414	413	LL Cool J	Radio	New in 2023
415	414	Mazzy Star	So Tonight That I Might See	New in 2023
416	415	Rancid	...And Out Come the Wolves	New in 2023
417	416	Iron Maiden	The Number of the Beast	New in 2023
418	417	Saint Etienne	So Tough	New in 2023
419	418	Bright Eyes	I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning	New in 2023
420	419	Gorillaz	Demon Days	New in 2023
421	420	J Dilla	Donuts	-34	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.
422	421	UGK	Ridin' Dirty	New in 2023
423	422	Travis Scott	Astroworld	New in 2023
424	423	Rush	Moving Pictures	-44	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.”
425	424	R.E.M.	Reckoning	New in 2023
426	425	The Mekons	Fear and Whiskey	New in 2023
427	426	Minutemen	What Makes a Man Start Fires?	New in 2023
428	427	MC5	Kick Out the Jams	-78	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.
429	428	Manu Dibango	Soul Makossa	New in 2023
430	429	Bill Withers	Just As I Am	-125	Sussex, 1971	On the cover, Bill Withers totes a lunch pail, highlighting the down-to-earth everyman vibe of the folk-soul music of his debut album (that’s Withers himself tapping on a box to keep the beat in “Grandma’s Hands”). As he said at the time, “I’m sick and tired of somebody saying ‘I love you’ with both arms up in the air like that.” Instead, Withers strummed his acoustic guitar and spun tales about absent fathers, his West Virginia grandmother, and life in Harlem.
431	430	Dizzee Rascal	Boy in da Corner	New in 2023
432	431	Os Mutantes	Os Mutantes	New in 2023
433	432	Sade	Diamond Life	-232	Epic, 1984	Nigerian-born fashion designer Sade Adu and her London band defined elegantly cool Eighties soul with their smash debut, Diamond Life. Torch ballads like “Smooth Operator” and “Your Love Is King” had a New Romantic opulence under the bittersweet pang of Adu’s voice. She wrote her first song, “When Am I Going to Make a Living,” on the back of a bill, while walking home in the rain from a bus stop after work. As she said, “All the songs I’ve ever loved — even jazz stuff — are things that tell a story.”
434	433	Drive-By Truckers	Southern Rock Opera	New in 2023
435	434	Taylor Swift	Red	-335	Big Machine, 2012	Taylor Swift shocked the world with her fourth album, breaking away from country music to make a record that recalled classics by the Beatles and Prince in the way it pulled from across the pop and rock landscape and transformed every sound it touched. The lead single, “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together,” was stomping, swaying electro-twang. “I Know You Were Trouble” rode a dubstep groove, and the title track was a swirl of banjos, dusty guitars, and talk-box elation. Tabloid types tied themselves in knots trying to figure out which song was about which ex, but the real news was Swift’s songwriting on high points like the astonishing “All Too Well,” as vivid a post-breakup remembrance as any artist has ever produced.
436	435	Judas Priest	British Steel	New in 2023
437	436	Yoko Ono	Fly	New in 2023
438	437	Boards of Canada	Music Has the Right to Children	New in 2023
439	438	Beat Happening	Jamboree	New in 2023
440	439	The Vaselines	Dum-Dum	New in 2023
441	440	The Avalanches	Since I Left You	New in 2023
442	441	Lil Wayne	Tha Carter III	-233	Cash Money/Universal Motown, 2008	By 2008, Lil Wayne contained multitudes: Best Rapper Alive, Pussy Monster, Martian, Weezy F. Baby (and the “F” is for, well, pretty much any word starting with “F”). Tha Carter III was a monument to this multiple-personality menagerie. “A Milli,” a glorified freestyle, fully crossed over to the mainstream, while “Lollipop,” a robotic R&B jam, rightly bet that an audience was ready to invest in Wayne’s croaky, syrup-addled singing voice. More than a decade later, even Wayne’s most outré personalities are still birthing musical descendants.
443	442	The Stranglers	Rattus Norvegicus	New in 2023
444	443	Beyoncé	Beyoncé	-362	Parkwood/Columbia, 2013	“I didn’t want to release my music the way I’ve done it,” Beyoncé said. “I am bored with that.” So she dropped her self-titled album on an unsuspecting world at the end of 2013, without a word of warning. Her fifth solo album, Beyoncé showed off her musical scope and feminist outreach, but it was also a visual album with a film for each song, shot around the world: New York, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, and of course, her native Houston. She had high-profile collabs: “Superpower” with Frank Ocean, “Mine” with Drake, “Flawless” with Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Drunk in Love” with her husband, Jay-Z. But Beyoncé proved that nobody else was on her level.
445	444	Ariana Grande	thank u, next	New in 2023
446	445	Bonnie 'Prince' Billy	I See a Darkness	New in 2023
447	446	Britney Spears	Blackout	-5	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.
448	447	The Orb	The Orb's Adventures Beyond the Ultraworld	New in 2023
449	448	Queen	A Night at the Opera	-320	Elektra, 1975	“Queen will be the Cecil B. DeMille of rock,” proclaimed singer Freddie Mercury, and this far-ranging, rococo album is the group’s ready-for-my-close-up moment. Bassist John Deacon wrote the melodic highlight “You’re My Best Friend,” a bouncy bit of Paul McCartney-esque pop; Mercury wrote the brutal rocker “Death on Two Legs,” about the band’s former manager; and guitarist Brian May wrote “The Prophet’s Song,” a doomy portent of a flood that runs 8:21 and includes a vocal canon from Mercury. But the coup was “Bohemian Rhapsody,” an opera buffa in which Mercury combined three different songs he’d been writing into a suite that took weeks to record.
450	449	Big Thief	U.F.O.F.	New in 2023
451	450	The Mamas & the Papas	If You Can Believe Your Eyes and Ears	New in 2023
452	451	The Mountain Goats	The Sunset Tree	New in 2023
453	452	Black Lips	Good Bad Not Evil	New in 2023
454	453	X	Los Angeles	-133	Slash, 1980	X stood out from the other L.A. punks — for one thing, they had a married couple in the band, John Doe and Exene Cervenka, venting their sexual and cultural rage over the high-speed rockabilly thrash of Billy Zoom and D.J. Bonebrake. Doe and Cervenka met in a poetry workshop, and you can hear it in the complex wordplay of “Johnny Hit and Run Paulene” and “Sex and Dying in High Society.” But they kick off their debut with a hilariously nasty bang: “Your Phone’s Off the Hook, But You’re Not.”
455	454	Justin Timberlake	FutureSex/LoveSounds	New in 2023
456	455	Young Thug	Barter 6	New in 2023
457	456	Dean Martin	Sleep Warm	New in 2023
458	457	Shakira	Dónde Están los Ladrones?	+39	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.
459	458	Van Halen	Van Halen	-166	Warner Bros., 1978	This debut gave the world a new guitar hero (Eddie Van Halen) and charismatic frontman (David Lee Roth). Tunes such as “Runnin’ With the Devil” and “Ain’t Talkin’ ’Bout Love” put the swagger back in hard rock, and Van Halen’s jaw-dropping technique, particularly on “Eruption,” raised the bar for rock guitar. “It sounded like it came from another planet,” Pearl Jam’s Mike McCready said of first encountering Van Halen’s playing. “Like hearing Mozart for the first time.”
460	459	Tracy Chapman	Tracy Chapman	-203	Elektra, 1988	Somehow, this young folk singer came out of nowhere to catch everyone’s ear during the hair-metal late Eighties. Tracy Chapman had already spent time strumming her acoustic guitar for spare change on the streets around Boston, but her gritty voice and storytelling made “Fast Car” a huge hit. Her debut confronted listeners with the raw truths of songs like “Behind the Wall,” a grueling portrayal of domestic violence sung a cappella, and the radical hope of the anthemic opening track, “Talkin’ Bout a Revolution.”
461	460	The Libertines	Up the Bracket	New in 2023
462	461	Scott Walker	Scott 4	New in 2023
463	462	Merle Haggard	Mama Tried	New in 2023
464	463	Alice Cooper	Love It to Death	New in 2023
465	464	Kate Bush	The Dreaming	New in 2023
466	465	Yeah Yeah Yeahs	Fever to Tell	-88	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.”
467	466	Jimmy Cliff	The Harder They Come	New in 2023
468	467	Thin Lizzy	Live and Dangerous	New in 2023
469	468	Lily Allen	Alright, Still	New in 2023
470	469	Earth Wind & Fire	That's the Way of the World	-49	Columbia, 1975	Before he got into African thumb piano and otherworldly philosophizing, founder Maurice White was a session drummer at Chess studios (that’s him on Fontella Bass’ “Rescue Me”). He stayed behind the kit as he led EWF. Their sixth album is make-out music of the spheres, incorporating doo-wop, jazz, and African music into a sound that’s sleek but never too slick; the title track is one of funk’s most gorgeous ballads, and “Shining Star” is a Seventies self-help seminar delivered over one of the decade’s sweetest grooves.
471	470	Sinéad O'Connor	I Do Not Want What I Haven't Got	-13	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.
472	471	Cyndi Lauper	She's So Unusual	-287	Portrait, 1983	With her garish thrift-store fashions and exaggerated Queens accent, Lauper had a kooky image that was perfect for MTV. But she also had a superb, clarion voice and a pack of great covers, including “Money Changes Everything” (originally by Atlanta New Wave band the Brains) and Prince’s saucy “When You Were Mine.” Lauper co-wrote four songs, including the lovely ballad “Time After Time” and the masturbation call-to-arms “She Bop.” But her smartest move was to change the lyrics of Robert Hazard’s “Girls Just Want to Have Fun” until it became a “very blatantly feminist” song about equality. “For a minute, I made it popular to be the odd guy out,” she said.
473	472	SZA	Ctrl	No change	RCA, 2017	Thanks to SZA’s lyrics about insecurity, jealousy, loneliness, and her search for “lovin’ and licky,” this assured debut brought a new self-searching spirit to R&B. The tracks are gentle and erotic, but beneath the singer’s soft-grained style, there’s fierceness; in “Dove in the Wind,” she tells a lover she can easily replace him with a dildo. On “Love Galore,” a duet with Travis Scott that describes an ambivalent breakup, she makes clear the vulnerability beneath the bravado: “Gimme a paper towel, gimme another Valium.”
474	473	Daddy Yankee	Barrio Fino	No change	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.
475	474	Big Star	#1 Record	No change	Ardent, 1972	Alex Chilton and Chris Bell were the Memphis whiz kids at the heart of Big Star. They mixed British Invasion pop finesse with all-American hard rock, from the surging “Feel” to the acoustic heartbreaker “Thirteen.” Big Star didn’t sell many records but did become a crucial inspiration to underdogs like R.E.M., the Replacements, and Elliott Smith. As Chilton said later, “If you only press up a hundred copies of a record, then eventually it will find its way to the hundred people in the world who want it the most.”
476	475	Sheryl Crow	Sheryl Crow	No change	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.
477	476	Sparks	Kimono My House	No change	Island, 1974	The duo of singer Russell Mael and songwriter-keyboardist Ron Mael coined a unique, influential sound that mixed glam and prog-rock, the Beach Boys and Frank Zappa. Russell adopts a florid falsetto to sing Ron’s lyrics about clumsy sex (“Amateur Hour”), Albert Einstein’s doting parents (the pun-filled “Talent Is an Asset”), and a broken suicide pact (“Here in Heaven”). The overwhelming sensation from Sparks’ third album is a sense that you’ve arrived at a party where you know no one and hear things you can’t comprehend but still have a great time.
478	477	Howlin' Wolf	Moanin' in the Moonlight	No change	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).”
479	478	The Kinks	The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society	-94	Reprise, 1969	While their British Invasion peers— the Beatles, the Stones, the Who — were getting psychedelic, Ray Davies took his band for a pastoral retreat, with witty portraits of quaint English small-town life fading away like “Big Sky.” Nobody bought it, but Village Green went on to become one of the Kinks’ most influential statements. “With ‘You Really Got Me’ and ‘All Day and All of the Night,’ we were saying, ‘We’re here, we’re gonna grab you,’” Davies told Rolling Stone. “The music on Village Green says, ‘Come find us.’”
480	479	Selena	Amor Prohibido	No change	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.
481	480	Miranda Lambert	The Weight of These Wings	No change	eRCA Nashville, 2016	The Nashville superstar sounded especially free and artistically uninhibited after her divorce from Blake Shelton, and she channeled it all into this expansive, mind-clearing two-CD set, an ambitious grab bag of deep breakup tunes (“Use My Heart,” “Tin Man”), Radiohead-y alt-rock moodiness (“Vice”), eye-rolling, scuz-guitar glam (“Pink Sunglasses”), and tender reflections on the bonds and weights of messy commitment (“Getaway Car”). It’s the sound of bad history falling away in the cracked rearview and nothing but wide-open road ahead.
482	481	Belle and Sebastian	If You're Feeling Sinister	No change	Jeepster, 1996	Being a self-pitying shut-in has never sounded better than it does on the Scottish twee icons’ breakthrough. The chamber-folk arrangements are second to none — like a cup of tea brewed for you by a hopeless crush with a really good record collection — but don’t sleep on Stuart Murdoch’s subtly sardonic lyrics on “The Stars of Track and Field” and “Seeing Other People,” which give these wistful-sounding songs a bite that sets them apart from most imitators.
483	482	The Pharcyde	Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde	No change	Delicious Vinyl, 1992	These high school friends from L.A. were a little like a West Coast answer to De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest, offering their own spin on alternative hip-hop in the Nineties and showing there was something going on in Southern California beyond G-funk. They rapped about innocent topics, like having a crush on a teacher in “Passin’ Me By,” which was a small hit, but also about dating a cute girl who turns out “to be a John Doe” and run-ins with the cops (the Public Enemy-homage “Officer”). It all came out as bright and refreshing as sorbet.
484	483	Muddy Waters	The Anthology	No change	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.
485	484	Lady Gaga	Born This Way	No change	Interscope, 2011	“Over-the-top” isn’t an insult in Gaga’s world; it’s a statement of purpose. Her second album is a work of blessed bombast, all arena-size sonics and Springsteenian romanticism, complete with a Clarence Clemons sax solo. There’s a thumping, half-in-Spanish song that proposes marriage to “a girl in east L.A.” (“Americano”), a synth-pop jam that includes a come-on on to John F. Kennedy (“Government Hooker”), and a touching ballad about a guy from Nebraska (“You and I”). Fittingly, the glam-slam title track became an LGBTQ anthem.
486	485	Richard & Linda Thompson	I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight	No change	Island, 1974	With Fairport Convention, Richard Thompson was one of the first prominent Sixties folk rockers to look to his native England’s traditions for inspiration. After leaving Fairport, he joined with his wife, Linda Thompson to make stellar albums in the Seventies. Richard played guitar like a Sufi-mystic Neil Young; Linda had the voice of a Celtic Emmylou Harris. Bright Lights is their devastating masterwork of folk-rock dread. Radiohead even picked up some guitar tricks from “The Calvary Cross.”
487	486	John Mayer	Continuum	No change	Columbia, 2006	After establishing himself as a post-Dave Matthews heartthrob, John Mayer grew into his soul and blues ambitions for a subtly crafted album aided by ace musicians like guitarists Ben Harper and Charlie Hunter, drummer-producer Steve Jordan, and jazz trumpeter Roy Hargrove — from the smooth Hi Records-tinged soul of “Vultures” to “Waiting for the World to Change,” a deceptively knowing and self-aware take on generational apathy.
488	487	Black Flag	Damaged	No change	SST, 1981	MCA refused to release this album, denouncing it as “immoral” and “anti-parent.” High praise, but Black Flag lived up to it, defining L.A. hardcore punk with Greg Ginn’s violent guitar and the pissed-off scream of Henry Rollins, especially on “TV Party” and “Rise Above,” which came with the timeless smash-the-glass salvo “We are tired of your abuse/Try to stop is but it’s no use.” Punks still listen to Damaged, and parents still hate it.
489	488	The Stooges	The Stooges	No change	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.
490	489	Phil Spector & Various Artists	Back to Mono (1958-1969)	No change	ABKCO, 1991	When the Righteous Brothers’ Bobby Hatfield first heard “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” with partner Bill Medley’s extended solo, he asked, “But what do I do while he’s singing the whole first verse?” Producer Phil Spector replied, “You can go directly to the bank!” Spector built his Wall of Sound out of hand claps, massive overdubs, and orchestras of percussion. This box has hits such as the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” and the Crystals’ “Da Doo Ron Ron,” which Spector called “little symphonies for the kids.”
491	490	Linda Ronstadt	Heart Like a Wheel	No change	Capitol, 1975	Linda Ronstadt completed her transition from California hippie-folk darling to soft-rock queen on her chart-topping fifth album, covering Hank Williams, Buddy Holly, Little Feat, and Kate and Anna McGariggle on the gorgeous title track. Her version of the Betty Everett oldie “You’re No Good” hits a perfect mix of desire and paranoia. Along with being a showcase for Ronstadt’s peerless versatility, Heart Like a Wheel is Seventies pop-rock craft at its sweetest and sturdiest.
492	491	Harry Styles	Fine Line	No change	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.”
493	492	Bonnie Raitt	Nick of Time	No change	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.”
494	493	Marvin Gaye	Here, My Dear	No change	Tamla/Motown, 1978	It’s one of the weirdest Motown records ever. Marvin Gaye’s divorce settlement required him to make two new albums and pay the royalties to his ex-wife – the sister of Motown boss Berry Gordy. So Gaye made this bitterly funny double LP of breakup songs, including “You Can Leave, But It’s Going to Cost You.” When he asks “Somebody tell me please, tell me please/Why do I have to pay attorney fees?” it’s one of the most strangely transfixing soul-music moments of all time.
495	494	The Ronettes	Presenting the Fabulous Ronettes	No change	Philles, 1964	More a Spanish Harlem street gang than a girl group, the Ronettes were pop goddesses dressed as Catholic schoolgirls gone to hell and back. Phil Spector builds his Wall of Sound as his teen protégée (and future wife) Ronnie Spector belts “Be My Baby” and “Walking in the Rain,” while songs like “I Wonder” and “Baby, I Love You” ache with hope for a perfect love that always seems to be impossibly ideal and just within arm’s reach.
496	495	Boyz II Men	II	No change	Motown, 1991	With their innocent romanticism and meticulous vocal arrangements, Boyz II Men became the most commercially successful R&B vocal group of all time. II includes two mammoth hits, courtesy of Babyface: “I’ll Make Love to You” and the audaciously baroque “Water Runs Dry.” But the group’s own Nathan Morris and Shawn Stockman composed II‘s most poignant moment, “Khalil’s Interlude,” a soft onslaught that’ll leave you sobbing in the fetal position: “I need shelter from the rain/To ease the pain of changing from boys to men.”
497	496	Shakira	Dónde Están los Ladrones?	No change	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.
498	497	Various Artists	The Indestructible Beat of Soweto	No change	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.
499	498	Suicide	Suicide	No change	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.
500	499	Rufus & Chaka Khan	Ask Rufus	No change	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.
501	500	Arcade Fire	Funeral	No change	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.