Highlights: "Broken English," "Guilt" This album is here because of who the artist is, their connection to pop music history, and how we're expected to read that into the mostly banal lyricism. The fact that it sucks on a visceral level is supposed to achieve symbolic meaning. It rests on merits of theater, or marketing, not music. It's a postmodern kind of critical acclaim, where the shortcomings and contradictions are profound until proven otherwise. We're told this album is an indictment of the icons and false promises of the '60s, but to have that weight it requires us to be preoccupied with rock tabloids in the first place, to glorify the artist for their connections in the first place. Pick a review at random and you'll find all the same name-dropping that occurred back then, the accolades of people that wronged her. She's trading in the coin she tells us is baseless. It's not just about celebrity eating its own head, we might suggest in her defense; it's about the rosy egalitarianism of the times. Then where does she stand now? The daughter of a baroness sings songs about a lower-class woman who will never have the rich man and the luxury car, covers John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" -- perhaps to self-flagellate, the generous listener thinks -- but what are Lucy Jordan and Lennon's hero to do? What's the heroism? Certainly not protest, unless it's to languish and snarl over deadbeat lovers, and political violence is right out. The only pointed political target besides Lennon's vague pancultural consumerist and authoritarian is the communist RAF, and her one point is that they don't represent her, literal royalty. There's nothing socially *constructive* she has to say, unless you count her dogmatic ode to witchcraft -- apparently *that's* the element of the counterculture she still finds credible! It's purportedly a personal triumph, an album of resilience... except defiance is only the most limited kind of resilience. She does after all fall back on the self-exploiting image of the Ruined Woman throughout the work. To credit her just for writing music after homelessness and losing custody of her child would be a grave insult to artists like Moon Dog or Joni Mitchell. Her attack on her milieu takes the form of a cautionary tale: see how horrible this is? Isn't this culture she's participating in right at this very moment so repugnant? Isn't this an awful, godforsaken wreck?

Highlights: "Music," "Don't Tell Me" It's ridiculous to justify how awkward this album is and how terribly it's aged by saying any of this was 'experimental' even by the most mainstream US pop standards. Cher's "Believe" had tested the waters for autotune two years before, and NSYNC was having a blast earlier that year running the gamut of gaudy special effects from ring modulation to step filtering to sequencers and ARP. Madonna has always been derivative, and by this time she's just in over her head, too. Do we care about lyrics? Ideas? Because she pretends to. Laughably absurd lyrical bookends to the album: singing about the bourgeoisie and how "selling out is not my thing" when she is literally Madonna. Can't you just do what every honest sellout does and send audiences glum and bitter putzing dispatches on your barbarism of reflection from the barren apex? Whatever. No good songs, but only four I skipped halfway through out of disgust.

Highlights: "The Spark That Bled," "Buggin," "Sleeping on the Roof" Props to the raw production on the drum and bass for trying to bring heat to one of the worst frontmen in the history of pop music. The weak, whining performance forces you to process the dumbest, most clumsily constructed lyrics you've ever heard. Right from the opener, a generous listener hearing about doomed scientists might think they're listening to an ode to the Curies. Nope! They're both explicitly men. After much searching, people conclude the scenario is totally made up because the band thought it seemed profound. Their juxtaposition of anodyne harmony and embarrassing childishness with stock morbidity is bankrupt, and it has to be shoehorned to fit the melody. And it's all like that. A superior form of this entire style was already created by Eels with Electroshock Blues, something that actually draws on life for its hard-won optimism and puts it into meter. Most of the psych elements here are ribbons and bows on something unsalvageable.

Highlights: "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child of Mine," "Mr. Brownstone" Axl Rose's falsetto is beyond parody. That has to be put aside before judging this. "Welcome to the Jungle" is a very well-constructed song, with all the makings of a hit. Can't say the same of the other hits on here. Van Halen and ACDC had been around for a decade; Metallica and Celtic Frost had been around for five years. It's just impossible to justify this pic unless this list were "1001 Singles You Have Probably Already Heard Before You Die". Slash's talent is holding this together, but the album is always some combination of samey, repugnant, and laughable.

Highlights: "Up to Me," "Slipstream" Strong performances from the entire group of a good variety of moods and styles marred by some bizarre and repellent lyrical choices. This is early enough in prog history to compete with Yes, Crimson, and Gentle Giant for claims of influence. But it stands out for being the most unpleasant sheerly from its unrepentant edgelord attitude, from clocking in three songs sympathetic to pedophilia to the closing arc in that British tradition of congratulating yourself as a prophetic revolutionary for dunking on the church. Maybe the biggest thing Tull imparted to future prog acts like Rush, Tool, etc is the undying attitude of preening libertarian faux-intellectualism. You know, the thing everyone hates most about prog.

Highlights: "Diamonds...," "Homeless," "Myth of Fingerprints" Definitely see this as a culmination of a lot of big influences more than groundbreaking, but you can hear it bridging Mitchell and '80s New Age into alternative like Bela Fleck and Dave Matthews. Also wasn't expecting to feel this correspondence from this "world music" touchstone to the Pan-American phantasmagoria of Van Dyke Parks, but it makes sense! Just well-made and an exciting transformation for a big artist, and more people should use their clout to give exposure to amazing acts outside the industry. LBM rules; the real star of this album.

Highlights: Hard to pick. It's consistent. There are some especially annoying ones to avoid like "Out of the Woods" and "Welcome to New York." Some specific notes apart from the obvious: 1. What's driving this more than the 808s and synths is that it is *festooned* with vocal tracks -- not as harmony, but as in Swift has a platoon of Swift hype-men at all times. 2. Although she's in the '00s-Present school of "loud = good" vocal performance, she's more effective at emoting than Katy Perry, granted Perry is working against anti-anxiety meds. 3. Despite there being a definite cookie cutter songwriting, every bridge completely dumps all the energy out of the song. You make all these hooks and do all this production and can't write a single decent bridge? What's up with that? But the obvious: Swift is extremely okay. There is nothing surprising here. The problem is all the people still trying to prove her excellence. She gets credit for being young. She gets credit for writing her own songs (partially). She gets credit for being marginally smarter than other pop songs by providing enough detail that the lyrics are effectively the script for the music video. She knows how to lean on a little wordplay to confuse confusion with profundity. None of this is meaningful.

Highlights: "Talk to the Wind," "Court of the Crimson King," honorable mention to the fuzz bass on "Schizoid," probably the hugest sound of the entire decade. The best thing about this album is its dramatic sense of transition. Crashing out of the stressful opener into the flute duet is better than either track in itself, and the same goes for the (progressively worse) dithering of "Moonchild" stumbling into a clearing and getting blindsided by the huge Mellotron theme of the closer. It has incredible *moments* that are spread thin. "Epitaph" is an interminable cliche, huge drag in the middle of the album. Everything people hate about prog is here at its start, too. It doesn't help that the band is not tight at all. It took King Crimson their entire career to learn how to lock in, and they were oh so proud of themselves for that too when they got there. The exciting synched staccato section of "Schizoid" highlights the band biting off more than they can chew, but it's roughest on "I Talk to the Wind," where the drummer Never Stops Filling. Production issues, in short. The lyrics are lovably dopey. "The wind cannot hear" always puts a smile on my face; Spinal Tap couldn't have done better. I like the idea of the album more than the execution, and I think every King Crimson fan does too if they're being honest. Grateful for their influence.

Highlights: "Long Tall Sally," "Great Balls of Fire" This is the energy level you expect of rock music, which gets lost in the studio recordings of the time. Good listen for anyone that thinks of twelve bar blues as stiff. Lewis' vocal delivery is probably the weak point here! The drummer and pianist are actively trying to destroy their instruments. Plenty of rushing. Short and sweet.

Highlights: "I Wanna Be Adored," "Sugar Spun Sister," "Made of Stone," "Fool's Gold" Very prescient for an album that leans so heavily on its influences, but maybe that's why this seems to set set the standard for the '90s pop rock sound before the decade even got here. The Las wouldn't show up for another year. "I Wanna Be Adored" could be an anthem rock single from any of the subsequent 30 years with the pentatonic riff floating on delayverb over the driving bass and kick. After that though, it's more strictly '90s. Most of it does sound like it's already figured out the next decade as a revision of the '60s for the amen break and '80s effects. Even some of the dated stuff still hits hard, like the super-flanged wurlitzer-sounding riff in the jam of "Fool's Gold". Drags and tries too hard in some parts like "I Am the Resurrection" and "Don't Stop," but absolutely succeeds in synthesizing contemporaries like U2 and Pixies to nail a modern revival of classic sounds.

Highlights: "Can't You Hear Me Knocking," "Bitch" First time giving the Stones a full listen, but pretty much knew how it was going to go. We can only hear them refracted through the people they influenced, and their contributions are now mostly cliche or worse. The good: The Stones know how to stab. They know how to use space to grab the listener. Their guitarists have a strong connection and know how to fill each other in. The old comparison to the Beatles is kind of absurd, but Stones' lyrics are smarter, with more thrust and coherence. The bad: Their twofold transatlantic minstrel show is especially repugnant on "You Gotta Move" and "Dead Flowers". This is the year after Let It Be and sure enough there's Phil Spector-y bullshit arrangements on a few tracks. It wasn't that far into the Stones' career but it's already kind of an echo chamber for the rock world.

Highlights: \"(sic),\" \"Eyeless\" Opens strong, doesn't maintain. Powerful vocal and drum performances that don't know how to work together. Trying too hard to capitalize on stuff that worked for a few famous predecessors; they're totally incompetent at incorporating hip-hop, and the individual horror gimmicks drag on about twice as long as they should. Trying too hard with lyricism as well; ideas aren't unified or cohesive, are just for the rhyme or have no metrical quality at all, and don't seem to respond to or cooperate with the musical changes. Just one thing after another. Some good bones and timbres and more musical skill and awareness of songwriting than most nu metal, but unoriginal and sloppy from the composition to the execution. Goes nowhere.

Highlights: "Bloodsucker," "Flight of the Rat" It's important that this is 1970. Zeppelin, Cream, The Doors, Sabbath and The Who *just* showed up. Bowie, Steely Dan, ELP, and "Close to the Edge" show up *next* year. Deep Purple asks several bold questions! What if The Who and Sabbath were louder? What if Hendrix and Cream were faster and harder? What if The Doors were good? What if Zeppelin was better? And they just do it. The band is so much tighter and more consistent than any other psych rock contemporary, from the rhythm to the leads, and yet they still push the boundaries of the genre with timbres and rhythms that would fit in with '80s New Wave, metal, and punk. It's a masterclass in how to maintain interest in a jam, and it's shocking how such an early example of the genre set such a high bar and aged so well.

Highlights: "You Done Me Wrong," "Honey Chile" It's very cruel to aphorize "influence is overrated" about one of the most appropriated men in musical history, so to put it another way -- I don't have a lot of appreciation for the white guys that ripped Fats Domino off either. Folding him into that Great Man Theory of pop music is the same injustice, a Terra Nullis debasement of musical culture. There's very few people I'd call the five star musical mind who was lightning in a bottle on a formal level like John Coltrane, someone who makes you say "the human race is so *lucky* to have had this person come along." Domino found the sound that other people spent decades unpacking and building up. What sets him apart in that context is the stuff he lacked -- strong vocal delivery, interesting solos, colorful arrangements, etc. We can't even say this is a great album of his; it's a partial collection of his work after the fact, and from what else I've heard of him it doesn't do him full justice.

Highlights: "Enough" The album is very much piggybacking FKA Twigs and Badu via Little Dragon without developing or contributing much. She Drakifies these influences so they can be purposed for MoMA catwalks and CW breakup montages. The heavy reverb and 808s are selling these extremely weak and repetitive melodies that cling to the roots. It's all overture, moody impressions you immediately forget everything about the second they're over. This music is designed as window dressing for *something else*.

Highlights: "Broken English," "Guilt" This album is here because of who the artist is, their connection to pop music history, and how we're expected to read that into the mostly banal lyricism. The fact that it sucks on a visceral level is supposed to achieve symbolic meaning. It rests on merits of theater, or marketing, not music. It's a postmodern kind of critical acclaim, where the shortcomings and contradictions are profound until proven otherwise. We're told this album is an indictment of the icons and false promises of the '60s, but to have that weight it requires us to be preoccupied with rock tabloids in the first place, to glorify the artist for their connections in the first place. Pick a review at random and you'll find all the same name-dropping that occurred back then, the accolades of people that wronged her. She's trading in the coin she tells us is baseless. It's not just about celebrity eating its own head, we might suggest in her defense; it's about the rosy egalitarianism of the times. Then where does she stand now? The daughter of a baroness sings songs about a lower-class woman who will never have the rich man and the luxury car, covers John Lennon's "Working Class Hero" -- perhaps to self-flagellate, the generous listener thinks -- but what are Lucy Jordan and Lennon's hero to do? What's the heroism? Certainly not protest, unless it's to languish and snarl over deadbeat lovers, and political violence is right out. The only pointed political target besides Lennon's vague pancultural consumerist and authoritarian is the communist RAF, and her one point is that they don't represent her, literal royalty. There's nothing socially *constructive* she has to say, unless you count her dogmatic ode to witchcraft -- apparently *that's* the element of the counterculture she still finds credible! It's purportedly a personal triumph, an album of resilience... except defiance is only the most limited kind of resilience. She does after all fall back on the self-exploiting image of the Ruined Woman throughout the work. To credit her just for writing music after homelessness and losing custody of her child would be a grave insult to artists like Moon Dog or Joni Mitchell. Her attack on her milieu takes the form of a cautionary tale: see how horrible this is? Isn't this culture she's participating in right at this very moment so repugnant? Isn't this an awful, godforsaken wreck?

Highlights: "I See You," "What's Happening?" Not even close to their best album, but some trademarks are here. "I See You" and "What's Happening" are pretty prescient -- there are sounds of 90s alt and 00s "post-punk" here. The smooth vocals in dark harmonies are the strength of their performance. But then, everyone apparently remembers it for "Eight Miles High," which is embarrassing. It gets hyped as "inspired by Coltrane and Shankar," which means these guys are lucky they didn't get the pants sued off them for defamation after associating those names with some of the worst guitar solos ever made. The album has a lot of tonal whiplash, going from a song about UFOs to the perspective of a child ghost of Hiroshima to a minstrel show about murdering your girlfriend, where the common thread is extreme pretension and sloppy performance. Maybe the strangest decision is to resolutely avoid meter and rhyme in much of the lyricism! It's easy to read Zappa and Beefheart's future lampooning into some of the arch psychedelic daze here, which almost dignifies it. Almost. The modernized covers of songs they love are some of the best and most enduring. At their best, they've aged better for our times than their bigger contemporaries. It's the deliberate "boundary pushing" that is the weakest part of the album.

Highlights: "Lookout," "Big Eyes," "I Want You To Want Me" Good mix of a strong performance and unbelievable crowd energy -- "I Want You To Want Me" is a surreal, idealized arena rock moment. Not sure how much of the sound is owed to Cooper, but either way we can call this a milestone in calibrating metal to pop sensibilities for the '80s. Cheap Trick can be more menacing than I realized, with "Big Eyes" basically being an Alice in Chains song, but they also carry sunny melodic pop ideas with that same relentless beat. It is taking resolute strides away from the blues backbone of the '70s metal standard.

Highlights: "Planet Caravan," "Hand of Doom" I was surprised that one of this album's strengths among psych-rock contemporaries is its relative restraint. Although their only guitarist sometimes cheats here with obvious panned overdubbing of solos, he generally resorts to clear and controlled phrases. In the context of our listening so far, compare the prepared pseudo-Indian ideas of "Planet Caravan" to the solos of The Byrds' "Eight Miles High." The studio tricks are used very sparingly and effectively -- the tremolo of "Iron Man," the slapback of "Paranoid," the reverse tape of "Rat Salad," the rotary speaker of "Planet Caravan," the pitch warp of "War Pigs" -- and they are never used to *disguise* the performance. If anything, the band could have used more production fluff; the frequent unison riffs sound thin by today's standards of distortion overtones and sustain, and every little mistake is glaringly obvious with only one guitar and no delay or modulation to hide behind. But you can imagine how fresh drop-C tuning would have sounded at the time. Give them better hardware and you've jumped 20 years forward to the "innovation" of Kyuss. And Osbourne's vocals hold a strong lead from beginning to end. The biggest weakness apart from arrangement is lyricism, of course. It's not the bombast. It's that Osbourne is just an intensely stupid man who strains to cobble together a rhyme or a blunt moralizing image. Good thing he's always either talking about blunt realities or pure flights of fancy. Did they invent heavy metal? Were they the first pop band to try to be evil? Close counts. Their use of chromaticism to that effect is just blues, but there is also an interesting preference for "medieval" harmony. I don't know how much other pop acts like Zeppelin pursued this before them, and that's on me. It's easy to root for a couple of blue-collar Birmingham guys that were only interested in playing things they wanted to hear in a subgenre marked by pretentious goals of expanded consciousness.

Highlights: (throws dart, removes blindfold) "Parasites," "M.A.D.," "Dragnet" Nobody gets credit for inventing a genre that doesn't exist, and earlier '80s metal already cemented the coalescing whiplash tempo change, but maybe they get credit for being the earliest example of "blast beats" I can think of? (PS apparently just the most trenchant abusers of it). No points for popularizing cookie monster syrup burp screaming. Genuinely difficult to be beyond parody from start to finish, but they did it!

Highlights: "Zillion Dollar Sadist" Here's a narrative: rock music has a boomerang in the 90s where it gets grunge, basically sorts out these fresh timbres and higher fidelity, and then reapplies them to the preexisting genres in a regression until we get all the way to the blues under curatorial pretensions with Beck, Black Keys, and White Stripes, guys Seeking to Imbue Simple Structures with Deeper Meaning. Turbonegro is at the inflection point of regression to hair metal, where people are thinking "hey, what if we took 90s rock and instead of it being about being a loser we made it about being perverts again." The performance of Westminster quarters in distorted harmonics can only be a reference to Cheap Trick as far as I know, and all that that implies. It does manage to sound like the climax of a song for the entire album. The solos are pretty rote but in "Zillion Dollar Sadist" and "Good Head" he does have these inspired intervals in the middle of some ascending lines. In the end, I don't know what I'm trying to appreciate. It's ultimately a Scandinavian response to pop punk of the earlier '90s, and then what? It's the Hives except the band's original name is Nazipenis and they're singing about sodomizing teenagers. Why did I need to listen to this?

Highlights: "Twice as Hard," "She Talks to Angels" A major difference between 90s and 00s music outside of hip-hop and R&B is that the "Alt" umbrella effectively contained "country rock". Even grunge bands by and large shared in qualities that would later be monopolized by "country" in the kitschy national cultural divorce of the Bush administration. So this album coming right on the dot in 1990 is certainly prescient if not extremely influential. The charisma of the drawl in bright, melodic tenor over waves of distortion that carries this album also lends success to Nirvana, STP, Alice in Chains, Fuel, Live, Train, on and on until it gives way to grizzled macho baritone-tenor in the 00s. There's actually color and diversity to most of the lyrics; the bridge of "Talks to Angels" kind of tramples its ideas, but otherwise it's really a pretty clever and sad song. Southern-ness in rock music eventually became a lodestone for ever-accumulating *prescription* until former rock-dominated Midwest states were ruled by country rock per se that was lyrically literally just consumerist catechism, so this also has value as a memento of a more earnest and authentic period for those characteristics in music.

Highlights: "Gimme Some Truth" Musically, this album is a retread. Even at the good parts, you are hearing "A Day In The Life," "I Am the Walrus," etc. Spector's here for the acoustic bits, and John uses distortion and slapback on the vocals to get trippy on the grooves. The lyricism is where things get ugly. Opening with the famous statement of "Imagine" means that the gauntlet of extremely negative, bitter songs that follow belie his utopianism. It is very easy to imagine something, John! That's true! Where the rubber meets the road, though, he's either totally confused and incoherent ("How") or disgusted by everyone around him (various). He betrays McCartney by projecting mother issues onto his marriage when a shared trauma of losing their mothers is something that brought them together ("How Can You Sleep"). He manages to give a non-apology for his serial domestic violence that searches for refuge in self-pity ("Jealous Guy"). Overall, just an awful human being exercising his dysfunction on his fans. Without any compelling music, we're forced to contemplate the inner life of an asshole, which wouldn't be so bad if he weren't both so addled and so evasive.

Highlights: "Sing About Me, I'm Dying of Thirst" Even though it would be easy to lampoon him, what makes Kendrick is his range. He has an impulse for changing voice and perspective; this album even carries a musical motif for the principle in the ramping of his voice through peaks and valleys ("mAAd City," "Backseat Freestyle"). Calling this album a "film" is key; unlike any other rapper at the time, Kendrick tries to be a cast of characters, and the director looming over them, and his own harshest critic. Although this is definitely a retro album, it deftly bridges the wild playfulness of E-40 with Tupac's arch seriousness from moment to moment. The opener "Sherane" flips the tired trope of the rap skit inside out by having it yank the listener out of an eerie, foreboding story at the height of its suspense. Kendrick gets principles like 'meanwhile, back at the ranch...' He has theater kid chops, but this is also his story to tell. His introspection gives the album's morality tale weight and complexity. Kendrick has never made a perfect album, with some ponderous, annoying jamming and corny self-indulgence, but the peaks are among any of his heroes. His characters divide his sympathies. His inner conflicts always pull him back in, and the listener along with him.

Highlights: All and none If you've heard one Muse album you've pretty much heard them all. I'm almost grateful because they're like America's one dose of clownish Eurovision bombast. They do "experiments" from one to the next that are more just savvy cash-ins; here it's on Beck's renewed popularity ("Supermassive...",) and Coldplay mania ("Starlight"). They also fart around at the end with Spanish-ness, orientalist motifs, and spaghetti western surf, and it's honestly their best because it knowingly embraces their campiness. They're like Nicolas Cage -- sometimes you're not are they're in on the joke. They do have very fleshed out cadences, almost Rufus Wainwright at times, but just because they have more chords doesn't make it fresh. The musical ideas tend to be stiff while the power comes from the performance, and the performance had exactly two dynamics. I will say this -- it's hard to make the Zvex Fuzz Factory sound good, and he manages to use its oscillation just enough to breathe some life into the arrangement. They are veteran stadium rockers. They can nail all of this live. If you're a middle manager in retail with no strong opinions on art that just wants to check Rock Concert off the bucket list -- accept no substitutes.

Highlights: "Apache," the airplane flanger fuzz bass on "Last Bongo in Berlin" Not only a centerpiece of our Imaginary '70s, but a liminal space for the beginning of hip-hop. Excellent production for performances by consummate professionals. As a matter of personal taste, I hated listening to this, but it also wasn't meant to be its own object. Historically critical. It's not fair to exclude Ennio Morricone or Ryuichi Sakamoto from the list when this is here. It's not technically a soundtrack because it's not for *one* film, but then that makes it a compilation. A compilation of covers. Frustrating litigation here.

Highlights: "Johnny," the background ambience seeping through the percussion in the middle of "Frankie Teardrop" Hard to say how much credit to give this. Tangerine Dream, Silver Apples, and Velvet Underground were ten years ago. We've had harsh creepy loops. True, full mix slapback is scary on a primal level. We've had tongue-in-cheek grotesques of capitalist Americana. I guess this is just the most complete, overt precedent for the stifled affectation of goth music. The one that made its way to David Lynch and William Basinski in LA. The repetition of both the music and the ideas does contribute to the ultimate sense of being trapped. In that way, it still feels current as theater more than music.

Highlights: "Tangled Up in Blue" Dylan's pretty open about gambling with ideas in his process, with every verse being a foray. It works best when he has a subject that matches that style, wandering and dissipation/transformation, which is what makes "Tangled Up in Blue" so strong that it kind of undermines the rest of the album. "Jack of Hearts" is fundamentally different, pure entertainment, but most of the songs in the album have their themes and sentiments already contained or superceded by that first song. Critical reception seems mostly hung up on how to read Dylan's life into this album, which is a big part of its popularity but also something I'm totally uninterested in. When he's open about playing around with meaning and seeing what truffles he roots up, it does belie his seeming wisdom as aloofness. "Idiot Wind" feels unfinished, a bundle of dead ends -- I can understand why fans reach after wartime allegory to justify it. His more cryptic ideas, like in "Shelter From the Storm," are for their own sake.

Highlights: "Red Light Indicates Doors Are Secured" The Strokes were five years ago at this point, so with added dashes of garage and surf aside, the main contributions here to the broad blend of pop punk and classic soul is Spencer's larger-than-life ethnography of Northern English pubs. Which is to say there's not much to say but lots of fun ways to say it. The clever rhyme schemes, eye for detail, and loads of punchy rhythms have the vocals and drums carry us through, but it's rare for a track to go by without a minute of jamming on some truly tedious and stale guitarwork. A lot of 00s retro hasn't aged well.

Highlights: "Empty House," "Clouds Up," "Bathroom Girl," "Dark Messages" Great production on interesting ensembles: huge monophonic synth sounds, sparks of acoustic strings, chimes of peaky modulation, full reverse tape, the tightest tom rolls in the universe. Lots to like. Wish there was more spooky psych out there. To overthink it, a mostly instrumental album is suitable for a po-mo-y story about projection, objectification, the dual dominance and paucity of images over text in how we make sense of modern life and others, etc. Good album!

Highlights: "Through the Wire," "All Falls Down," "Slow Jamz," "Family Business," "Jesus Walks" Enough has been said about this too recently, and most of it's accurate. Here's more anyway. Kanye is our John Lennon, in a bad way. I get that murder rap was out of control and he was right to look for something affirmative, but it only kind of excuses the way he talks out both sides of his mouth about materialism as his alternative expression of masculinity, which he makes more palatable by balancing against racial commentary. It feels like Kanye understood that Jay-Z had a lean-out neo-conservative neo-respectability politics he agreed with, but it had become too dry, too much straight-laced inventorying of assets, and it just needed a raving lunatic like him to evangelize. A weird thing about Kanye's lyrics here is that he's somehow his most sympathetic and insightful when he is angriest. The way he draws lines in the sand and shuts others down can be very cutting. I don't want to do scrying about how we might have read his MAGA meltdown into this stage of his career, but his vision of the world's ugliness at least is much more coherent than his solutions. It's the music that puts him in history. His corrective to hip-hop was rehashing the kind of things people like Fugees, Mos Def, and Kweli were already popularizing. It's the music that gives it weight. The gift to us is his perennially counterintuitive use of distortion on aux percussion and the lean into the incongruity while chopping samples, turning that into a source of impact. And at 80 minutes, there are definitely still dead spots. Ivy's verse on "Never Let Me Down" is abysmal. I can't really find the Conscious Rap message behind the misogyny in stuff like "The New Workout Plan." The super compressed acoustic guitar tracks sound very dated and corny. This album is only really a breakthrough for his personal brand. For pop music, it's more like he'd synthesized all his influences into a strong capstone for the impact he'd already had.

Highlights: "Lark Tongues in Aspic Part 2," "The Talking Drum," the Fripping at the end of "Exiles" This album is in an annoying space where it's trying to bridge high-minded stuff like Reich, Bartok, and Derek Bailey, but even though it's technically much better performed than CotCK, the band is never on the level of most of their "high" influences while also sacrificing memorable melody and riffs that are assumed for pop and rock. The pop influences are also right on the sleeve all the time. It's truly baffling if/how they copied Pink Floyd a mere three weeks after Dark Side of the Moon was released, and the most obvious influence of all is Yes. Even if I think Crimson's harmony is more interesting, they're leaning so much here on the ideas of Close to the Edge (1972). We do hear the emergence of Fripp's signature superprocessed guitar sound, which he would continue to develop with Brian Eno, and Jamie Muir's found object percussion is still fresh, surprising, or sometimes just charming.

Highlights: "Self Esteem," "Come Out and Play" It's easy to accept this as the inception of 90s pop punk along with Dookie. It's harder to accept this as the best selling indie album ever. It's not because it's a fresh outside voice though. It's easy to understand its success as a use of popular influences. "Self Esteem" is very Nirvana, but it was surprising at how much Metallica is in here -- not so much harmonically, but in the rhythms and timbres, from the guitars to the quasi-Hetfield vocals. They always have little dashes of Latin in their stuff, seemingly as a bad gag, so I was trying gauge their relationship to it here. I'd never read/understood the lyrics to "CoaP" before, so thinking about a bunch of seemingly white guys talk about putting away the colors and doing a exotica snake dancer riff for some reason seemed very Clintonite "superpredators" liberal for a punk album. Same goes for the penultimate song talking about how they weren't responsible for polluting the air when the album's first two songs are about souping up cars and road rage. Much like the jarring MIDI-like mixing of backup vocals on "Bad Habit," it's so bad it's funny. Mainstream punk is a nice metonym for the feckless liberalism of this decade, and this album is a nice metonym for mainstream punk.

Highlights: "Proud Mary," "Born on the Bayou," "Keep on Chooglin" Even though we know these ideas were in the air and people were converging on them, it is hard to believe that Led Zeppelin I was released a week after this. Before this, what we hear on The Byrd Brothers might exemplify "country rock," but CCR brings in the heaviness of Cream, and Fogerty's raw vocals are a world apart, owing more to classic blues or the Beatles and Stones. Even if the sound owes a lot to psych, Fogerty's lyrics are much more grounded and understanding of the themes of their blues roots. It's also not common up to this point for psych bands to do seven minutes of jamming -- that's honestly more accurate to Indian influences than the bands that were heaving those pretensions around. I come away with a positive impression! It's not for me, but I'm convinced this is a band with proper appreciation of their influences that is serious about their music and finding their own voice.

Highlights: "Stop," "Been Caught Stealing" There's an incredible survey of genres here. You can hear the Madchester, but also dub and punk, and above all hair metal. Once again, actually not sure how much credit to give this, because I avoid hair metal in general. But the fact that this and Alice in Chains' "Facelift" came out on the *same day* owes something to someone. It hurts to say I may have to listen to Aerosmith for reference; that wasn't how I thought of Jane's Addiction before, but it is now. This album is painfully LA. It's not just raw punk meets psych and metal; they threw the whole bag of studio tricks at this album, without which it would be unbearable. Case in point, the complete inability of Perry to double-track normally or prefer the song's key over his go-to intervals, sounding like a carousing band of selves at karaoke. There's also a lot of brooding, artsy fluorishes (so help me, "Then She Did" pursues some Zappa-era George Duke ideas) that may do more harm than good. The lyrics can once in a while have real power to them, dramatic surprises -- never enduring for a whole song, but for moments in "Three Days," "And Then She Did," and "Classic Girl," like "I would have introduced you to my mom...she was unhappy like you" or the twist from "that's how we were" to "actually, that's how we are." It's also unable to separate good ideas from bad ones; the Lou Reed-y confessional, essayistic aspect draws out things that are just embarrassing, like the entirety of "Of Course." One of the most uneven albums I've ever heard; unforgettable peaks, dismal valleys.

Highlights: "Lady," "Jonz in my Bonz," "Me and my Dreamin' Eyes" R&B mid-90s had already absorbed plenty of funk and hip-hop. What sticks out here in context is plenty of other stuff: the timbres, the harmonies, and the rhythm. "Neo-soul" is more a cluster of associated artists that formed a new guard of Serious Musicians in R&B: Erykah Badu's 1997 "Baduizm," The Roots, Bilal...Thundercat was an understudy twinkle in their eye. It isn't just how old-school the soul can get with D'Angelo but how much jazz extension and ornamentation is in here -- not an innovation but a cut above a lot of his peers. If anything, his style seems to owe a lot to Prince, his appreciation of groove and his tentative, exploring falsetto. But even Prince has spent much more time in a very timbrally embellished place. It's really taken "neo-soul" a long time to renegotiate the bells and whistles of synths and high production, and it's easy to forget it started as a "conscious" reaction against that. Gone are the '80s crystal leads, the vocoders, the pads, (most) strings, the trippy modulation, the scratching, the guitar is filtered down to a heeled wah, gone gone gone. This is so stripped down and dark that you really get this central heavy thud, this behind the beat feel that only became more pronounced over D'Angelo's career until Questlove popularized a formalized version with THAT quintuplet beat. D'Angelo gave pop this feel. 4/5

Highlights: "Inner Crisis," "Ingoo Pow-Pow" It seems like the main contribution of this album historically is for a genuine South African voice to respond to or participate in Pan-African, Afrofuturist, and Diasporic thinking in American music. Which is great! Just not strictly musical. More cynically, the reason it appears on our list seems to be its production polish to rough free jazz precedents and a boon to music industry cult of personality. It's hard to dig up Masekala's influences or work with any jazz greats on Wikis for his albums, but pull up the man's Wiki bio and -- oh look! The Byrds had him play with them when Mandela was in the news! Paul Simon collaborated with him after his success with Graceland! Hm! There are many different styles of jazz here; I regret abusing the term "survey" when I need it here, and I might just be parading my ignorance in this review. But thinking of Masekala's seeming influences, the exploration of harsh timbres, the group improv, the Afro-Cuban forays, the variety of instrumental textures while sticking to small ensemble... Pharoah Sanders had put out several albums already; Charles Mingus and Sun Ra had both released over twenty albums; Dizzy Gillespie had popularized Afro-Cuban jazz stateside twenty years ago. It's a decent album. "Ingoo Pow-Pow" feels like a strong cliffhanger of a closer, and "Inner Crisis" has aged well. The production is also way better than most Sun Ra; Masekala's pop jazz background has helped make his influences more digestible. This is more of a meta-criticism again. Why is Mingus the only one with an album here? And it's 1963's "Black Saint." Not "Oh Yeah." "Let My Children Hear Music" was right alongside Masekala in January 1972. Frustrating.

Highlights: "Maybe Baby," "Tell Me How" Unimpressed. Coming on the heels of Little Richard and Elvis, this feels derivative even at the best parts. Probably the most interesting thing is the jarring backup vocals, just because it comes across as growing pains of the period's pop music, trying to make sense of new sounds. Again, no points for mythmaking. Lots of mediocre and problematic artists in the 27 club. It's hard to see Holly changing the course of music history or even having a positive influence if he'd survived.

Highlights: "Fuckin Up," "Love to Burn," "Mother Earth" This is Exhibit A for the fundamental overlap of 90s rock and country. Sure, the album is samey. The songs are all overlong. The lyricism can have shocking and bitter moments of candor, but is mostly some blend of sappy and creepy. The most common first impression on hearing Neil Young's wan voice is "you've got to be kidding me." But that guitar, and that surprising juxtaposition with those CSNY vocal harmonies, carry on in the best grunge and alt music. Young's solos here can evoke the 80s and 90s, but sit somewhere outside of them: cascades of pinch harmonics like a hair metal stunt man, but no buzzsaw chugging or hyperactive peddling of rote exercises; waves of feedback and sputtering, but not the flat terrain of distortion pedal waveforms. His technique here is through the dynamics of the amplifier, and you couldn't get it any other way. The decade's timbres are just chasing a facsimile. Worth the listen just for that.

Highlights: "London Loves," "End of a Century," "Trouble in the Message Center," "This is a Low" Blur is the kind of band that never let expectations get in the way of making a decent pop song. Among similar bands, they also strike the best balance between the cracked vulgarity of Ween's parallel development and the increasingly self-serious tone of their predecessors in XTC. The lyrics can be mocking or sad and still find a way to be affirmative or charming, like they're matched to Albarn's voice. They're hungry for hooks, a teasing timbre or a modal wrinkle, stacking them on top of each other as high as they can. They know what they like, drifting from XTC to Beatles to Bowie to Pink Floyd for ideas. The tonal clutter, like a suburbanite playroom or a commercial break, is a 90s staple. At the same time, there's hardly ever a breakthrough, a culmination or a centerpiece. This is like the Honda Civic of pop groups, the ol' reliable, the crown royalty of 3-star music.

Highlights: "Like a Rolling Stone," "Ballad of a Thin Man," "Queen Jane Approximately," "Desolation Row" This is just a superior front-to-back listen to Blood on the Tracks. Every song has some memorable lines; many songs have these slowly emerging concepts, a suspense that carries verse by verse. What doesn't work for me is the heavily repeated motif of free-flung half-allusions where some famous figure appears for one stanza to do something plausible but uncharacteristic and/or anachronistic. He couldn't commit to some kind of retelling or even blunt allegory, but wowzers don't you know the whole darn culture has gone topsy-turvy? It's also hard to parse Dylan's charming phrases from the suspect Bohemian and Beat attitude he leans into. He plays around with this, certainly. Is he the native or the stranger? Is he the voyeur or the spectacle? From the first song, at least, he deflects with a torrent of criticism -- fair, well-observed, but deepening his own mystique takes the pressure off him as well. People may have been mad about him going electric, but his attitude and perspective can make you wonder how folksy he ever was in the first place. Did this break ground? Would I want others to imitate this? I've heard some that tried and I wasn't too pleased with it. It captured the public imagination at least, and it's *fun*. He throws away great lines like they're nothing, just whisking you along with all this assurance to his broader statement of concept on Desolation Row. Hard not to get sucked in.

Highlights: "Act of Contrition," "Till Death Do Us Part," "Dear Jessie" This seems like an instance of image and brand superseding music. The deeply personal subjects don't make the lyrics inherently good. It presupposes a fan's parasocial emotional investment. There's a real clumsiness to her lyrics, like the phrases don't have rhythm or carry melody. Some ideas are better than others, but they also contradict in an artless way, like how she immediately goes from moaning about how glad she is to have escaped her father to a blunt insistence on keeping families together. There are interesting hooks, busy keybass -- but also thin mixing and overwrought, hokey backing vocals. The Prince tracks are all standouts that make we wish he'd kept them for himself. The other striking elements in her music are very reminiscent of Kate Bush. In the end, it has good moments musically, and even some striking performances like parts of "Spanish Eyes." But there's nothing she contributes to her influences, and it's no culmination of those influences. Derivative, maudlin, and annoying much of the time.

Highlights: "Mona," "Route 66" This was a hot seller, but not a strong debut. It's a touchstone of cultural appropriation, the three originals being the weakest on the album. The only cover that seems to add an edge is what "Route 66" does with Berry's take on the lounge original. "King Bee" and "Mona," which would seem a highlight, are nearly identical to their source. There's little to appreciate here, even for its time.

Highlights: "The New Style," "No Sleep Till Brooklyn," "Rhymin and Stealin" Not for nothing do these guys jokingly compare themselves to Jerry Lewis. That cuts both ways. It's appreciative musically. Some of these beats are really great for '86, with an inspired, intuitive ear almost like Madlib, flanging snares, reverse bass, jarring sample cuts dropping the bottom out of verses, swarming vocal panning and overdubbing. The use of noise and rock is also strong for the time. RunDMC was *referencing* rock with keyboard approximations of My Sharona and Walk This Way, but they lose the edge. They lose it in the vocal delivery as well. The Beastie Boys, meanwhile, are absolutely letting real guitar samples run amok and screaming their heads off like all their pop metal influences. But. I don't really buy their tongue-in-cheek approach all the way. It registers as satire for future periods, but in context it's more like racist bad faith. Especially when gun violence and pimping tropes were not at all the norm in hip-hop, it comes across as culturally toxic. Make that two counts, because 80s-90s get broadly characterized by a swell in "(mass) youth culture," and this definitely seems like a reference point for that predatory chimera. What is the *function* of the satire? Do we think that trying to name an album "Don't Be A Faggot" at the peak of the AIDs epidemic was the choice of some progressive allies who wanted to deflate stigma and break down boundaries? Just because Eminem joked about being Elvis in 2002 doesn't make it a joke. Just because Beastie Boys joked about being Jerry Lewis doesn't make it a joke.

Highlights: "Mona," "Calvary" The jam is cemented in pop this year; we have CCR two months before, and King Crimson in the Fall. We can credit Quicksilver for their craft in jamming: they vary dynamic range, listen to each other, feature each other, and move cohesively through ideas. I can't properly credit them for any particular riff or lick -- maybe later after hearing more context for them. It just lacks standout moments or statements other than the base material, which is not theirs. We have now heard Bo Diddley three times, a man not featured on this list! Why not give him the Fats Domino treatment at least? This is a much better 'raga' than the Byrds offered five years ago, but not a remarkable album apart from how it lays out the grab bag of jamming gimickry. Accelerando! Turn on an effect! Call and response! Breakdown! Buildup! They're holding the line for a form I think is boring and dishonest, but yes they're holding the line.

Highlights: "Head Cut," "Monitor," "Into the Light" This is a big leap from the punk sound of The Scream. You can definitely see how they readily synthesized Eno, Joy Division, Suicide, Einszturzende Neubaten, and Public Image LTD. into their own more entertaining sound. This formative goth album seems like it's *less* dire and depressive than its contemporary influences (Public Image Ltd., Einszturzende Neubaten, Joy Division, Kraftwerk). It seems to pull in more interesting production and harmony from Eno while providing a driving energy that he mostly got from collaboration with other artists. It's impressive that such chromatic and noisy guitarwork is able to stay behind the vocals and just build atmosphere, or that the bass is able to rein that sound into the song structure. So much metal now sounds more like this than any metal per se from the 80s. "Monitor" could have been released any time in the past forty years. This is another album where a sound from the next decade just seems to pop out fully formed. It needed a lot of groundwork from other great acts, but it sounds like a breakthrough in pop.

Highlights: "Take It Easy" The thing about this Eagles album is they have a couple decent singles but just look at 1972. What a year. Talking Book. Can't Buy A Thrill. Pink Moon. Let's Stay Together. Close to the Edge. Machine Head. Even stuff in Eagles' own ostensible subgenre like Harvest and Can't Buy A Thrill blows them out of the water. That just leaves them the sellout of Laurel Canyon, the boyband parasite of The Grateful Dead, the well-produced gang of real musicians who refuse to be more than mediocre. The Eagles grew over time. Their songwriting got stronger and more varied. They had far better ballads and far better rockers. Meaning this is also probably their worst album. Mere professionalism in production and performance, no less, no more.

Highlights: "In It for the Money," "Richard III," "It's Not Me," "Caught by the Fuzz," "Wait for the Sun" For American listeners, this could be a good find, overshadowed by overrated contemporaries. This album is pretty late to retro British pop, and it might lean on The Beatles more heavily than any other of the scene, but what makes it notable is its varied and surprising harmony, confusing and catchy at the same time. Their vocals and guitar tend to be harder than their peers, similar to Smashing Pumpkins but more melodic, which makes them a better fit among the emo and blues retro of the next decade's pop rock. It is overlong, and it doesn't cohere as an album. The hodgepodge tone of the sequence does help break up the excessive runtime, but not all 21 songs are worthwhile. It's not as though Oasis or Blur were serious or mature lyricists, and all Britpop acts can be grating, but Supergrass gives in to some exceptionally tedious lowbrow moments that hold them back from the gravitas that people attribute to their contemporary Radiohead, despite having equally interesting highlights.

Highlights: "Genesis," "Phantom," "Stress," "Waters of Nazareth" In the past, I would have assumed from "DANCE" that this was just someone reheating Daft Punk from 10 years before, but this is actually something you hear huge names cribbing from 3 years later. Literally 3 years. Kanye's MBDTF? 2010. Skrillex's first singles? 2010. Crystal Castles II? 2010. Sleigh Bells? 2010. Tell me even the infamous "Party" is not Ke$ha? 2010. Come on. All of synthwave was waiting for this development in mixing. Carpenter Brut was 5 years, and there's no way as a Frenchman this wasn't something that made him quit metal and pick up some keys. Slamming the mids on samples to hell is something everyone is still doing under pretenses like "breakcore" or whatever. I don't really like it. Some of the things that are meant to build tension and hype just annoy. Even the satisfying cadences are textbook and don't carry the heavy repetition too far. But '10s-'20s have been The Great Clippening, so no matter what, you absolutely have to hand it to them.

Highlights: "Hotel California," "New Kid in Town," "Life in the Fast Lane" Even at their best, you think of something they sound like at that moment, and if you look it up, it's just behind them. Life in the Fast Lane sound a lot like ZZ Top? La Grange was a couple years ago. Getting Elton John vibes from the ballads? There's Yellow Brick Road! Flanged out vocal harmonies? There's Queen, four albums deep. Minstrel reggae in Hotel California? The Wailers had a Best Of release in '71, and Clapton Shot the Sheriff in '74. Just because it's derivative and calculated doesn't make the hits bad. There's inspired and memorable songwriting in the three openers. If you cut the album in half, you have a four-star EP.

Highlights: "The Spark That Bled," "Buggin," "Sleeping on the Roof" Props to the raw production on the drum and bass for trying to bring heat to one of the worst frontmen in the history of pop music. The weak, whining performance forces you to process the dumbest, most clumsily constructed lyrics you've ever heard. Right from the opener, a generous listener hearing about doomed scientists might think they're listening to an ode to the Curies. Nope! They're both explicitly men. After much searching, people conclude the scenario is totally made up because the band thought it seemed profound. Their juxtaposition of anodyne harmony and embarrassing childishness with stock morbidity is bankrupt, and it has to be shoehorned to fit the melody. And it's all like that. A superior form of this entire style was already created by Eels with Electroshock Blues, something that actually draws on life for its hard-won optimism and puts it into meter. Most of the psych elements here are ribbons and bows on something unsalvageable.

Highlights: "Grumpus," "The Old Gold Shoe," "Nashville Parent" A band could do worse fusion than classic soul with New Wave and country touches. The band can build an atmosphere, but they're at the mercy of the vocalist on this one. There's a very narrow context in which the falsetto works, like on the second track, but he often pulls it out at a terrible time. I try to appreciate this as something similar to Nick Cave, but the surreal, mysterious appeal of some lyrics mostly seem to dance around being a sordid alcoholic, and fittingly never arrive at something fulfilling.

Highlights: "Personality Crisis," "Vietnamese Baby," "Jet Boy" The vocal delivery sells this. It trails Bowie and The Stooges by a hair in the early punk scene, but when you hear about how hard and gnarly The Stooges are, *these* are the vocals you expect. I also dig the way its campiness manifests as mimetic gags musically, the panning flanger machine gun on "Vietnamese Baby" and the train whistle double stop bends on "Subway Train". The guitar's indulgence of noise over note values builds to chaotic finales that are ahead of their time. Sometimes it's just too long in getting there. You could fault it for having incoherent lyricism, sometimes seeming cryptic and other times seeming like the singer can't remember the lines. Not exactly progressive so much as transgressive, or just confusing. You could say this set a new standard if only because it brings the intensity and the performance you expect of this genre. I would prefer this lesser-known act over several contemporaries.

Highlights: "American Idiot," "Holiday" It's easy to understand the success of this as a resolute musical comeback for a beloved pop group, with all the hooks and energy their fans could want. But I don't think anyone would have asked for this group to make something so self-serious as a narrative concept album with nine-minute medleys. You can't really call it a "rock opera" so much as a musical, a mark of the increasing convergence in emo et al between rock fans and theater kids. You could imagine Lin Manuel Miranda featuring somewhere in here. Just kidding. But not really. "Dookie" has an appeal as one of many 90s albums about being a loser, something way more grounded and honest and sympathetic than being a millionaire in the Bay making an utterly flat character with a 'Christ figure' label say "how dare you sir." What's really so frustrating is that the narrative seems to obscure the initial setup. The lyrics of "Holiday" don't even line up semantically, let alone arrive at a message, but you definitely get extremely political airs with a clear context of Bush-era jingoism for two wars in the Middle East. And this album literally has a bleeding heart as a weapon on the cover. And it says nothing at all with that. The protagonist gets a girlfriend, smokes weed, gets dumped, and commits suicide. The "letterbomb" in the album if *figurative* for a mean letter sent to an ex. Even if this is some allegory, suggested by the inept use of quasi-pseudo-Indian affect to introduce the love interest, the tail is wagging the dog, and it's not only incomprehensible but ultimately self-pitying. It's purely inward-looking, interested in the suffering and guilt of Americans. Or else that's giving it too much credit. Really a touchstone of feckless liberal resistance preening, a work of dithering, diffusive controlled opposition, a great cash cow dropped all of two months before Bush took a second term, giving no one a moment's pause over what it really had to say.

Highlights: "Zombie" Few notes, really. Rare to have an album that influences multiple genres so quickly, from jazz to rock to pop, but it gets there by being a successful synthesis itself -- of Nigerian music, jazz, and funk. This propulsive opener has to be one of the most significant direct international influences on American music since bossa nova, Afro-Cuban jazz, or Hawaiian steel. Thinking about how afrobeat works its way through the next forty years, along with reggae, I was wondering if the rampant exoticism of the 80s says something about the post-Vietnam ennui, as though after MIC called the public's bluff, people found themselves looking outward to relive their own thwarted romantic expectations of art as protest. It's more charitable to think there was real recognition or appreciation; people intuitively felt Cesaire's claim that fascism is colonialism turned inwards.

Highlights: "Mysterons," "It Could Be Sweet" This was contributing to a very fresh subgenre, maybe piggybacking Massive Attack's Protection, but while it's hard to find precedent (ATCQ, likely), it's easy to see influence. I wouldn't be surprised if this spurred Björk's development on 1995's Post, Beck's move away from Primus and Ween sounds to what we hear on Odelay, and any number of mournful '90s alt hits glazed over a breakbeat -- Dido, Sarah McLachlan, Paula Cole, etc. For all that, though, its striking impression is already spread very thin by 50 minutes. The dusky, plaintive brooding gets monotonous quickly. So at least it's consistent?

Highlights: "Queen of Royal Badness," "Come Into My House," "Latifah's Law" At the end of the 80s, this hip-hop album is still coming across stereotypically stiff most of the time, but there's been plenty of development; Latifah pulls out overt house and reggae, cheesy cinematic samples prescient of Wu Tang, some rap rhythms that we still hear today, and some surprising, offset rhyme schemes that you could imagine coming from Andre 3000. What really dates this more than the sounds is what passes for a progressive message; besides incessant self-promotion as emancipation, something we know all too well, Latifah's interpretation of African Zionism mostly has to do with invoking great figures of the continent's ancient history, but the celebration of femininity is sometimes at odds with it. Actually, it's worse -- explicitly subordinate, even misogynistic: "Queen Nefertiti, the Mother of civilization will rise...secondary but still necessary for reproduction..." The most backhanded compliment anyone has ever given *themselves.*

Highlights: "Grace," "So Real," "Mojo Pin" It's a critic's fantasy to champion an obscure record and have their taste validated over the years by the biggest artists in the world. My guess would be Buckley didn't have a punchy single that could contend with the grunge-alt craze in 1994, and his slow building but dramatic melancholy had to wait for internet music culture to become ubiquitous. Radiohead who? Coldplay who? Acts like Wild Beasts and Muse are transparent here, and if you squint you can even make out Grizzly Bear, Wovenhand and post rock. But it's really prescient of the broad shift in off-radio '00s guitar based bands to this moondrunk moodiness.

Highlights: "All Your Love," "Hideaway" This narrowly slips in before Hendrix with that heavy midrange and the Marshall sound, and Clapton does have some good tone and licks. The tone on the opener sounds bleary or washed out in a way that has aged remarkably well, and the album ends on some great feedbacking harmonic. A lot of unforgivable lyrics on here, but especially "Little Girl." Almost as unforgivable is the bumbling and interminable drum solo on "What'd I Say." Ultimately, it reminds you of why blues rock feels so utterly dead: from the start, it's been promulgated by unabashed middle-aged British statutory rapists. Don't feel bad for letting Clapton's later outbursts of 1800s-level racism tarnish your perception of this mediocre album.

Highlights: It's consistent, so take your pick. There's some interesting piano accents, some earworm guitar riffing on "Move Over" and an engaging band groove on "Half Moon." None of the songs are quite as catchy as her breakout hit "Piece of my Heart." Most importantly though, Joplin never ever lets you forget for one second what her whole scam is. Once a song gets moving, every opportunity the band has to breathe, you know she's going to have to step all over it with craven, bankrupt blackface yammering.

Highlights: "Elegie," "Redondo Beach," "Break It Up" Depending on how you count it, it's way way ahead of its time. Something about the production as well as the 'minimalism' is the kind of thing that would get anachronistically called post-punk or new wave. The case against that is to look back at Velvet Underground, which also has a lot of that going for it in 1967 -- the dry, ungospelled Warhol Factory vamping. Smith's main "contribution" to that is to take away the cold, understated observational lyricism of Reed and replace it with a rumpus fusion of Captain Beefheart and Yoko Ono. The lyricism has this promising scene-setting and characterization that rapidly degrades over the course of the vamp. Maybe what's good in it mostly owes to the source material, because she's usually cribbing. No wonder critics vaunt this circle-jerk hero worship: one's about Jim Morrison, one's about Hendrix, one's about Burroughs, one's about a book on psychoanalysis. Rimbaud has to keep hearing beatniks use his name to dignify unedited transcripts of LSD-induced free-association. I don't get much out of her saying her baby sister's soul is a network of spittle and glass balls in streams of cold logic that she's waiting for lightning to crack open. I don't think it warrants the degree of repetitive fixation it gets. But she has to do that because that's the generic convention she's set for herself. "Experimentalism" is as much a convention here as any bestselling Serious Novel about a stuffy academic's sordid affair. But if we ask ourselves "what was the Library of Congress thinking inducting this," I think this was the period where po-mo naivete was most justifiable, and Smith is readily able to *account for* and *expound on* her artistic choices, which is all a postmodern artist needs to be taken seriously. Any incoherent or ridiculous idea in a song can be explained away as occupying another point of view or redeeming from the pawnshop of pop culture or simply exploring the limits of language. The question is who's still buying that.

Highlights: "The Wreck of the Ol' 97," "San Quentin," "A Boy Named Sue" Not sure why this is nominated over so many Cash albums *in addition to* Folsom. I'll save the pragmatics of the prison tour for that review. This packages together some of his career highlight songs, I guess. As far as performance, his theatrical jokes and audience interaction land wooden and contrived, and he jerks his band around pretty selfishly, but it has the same steely confidence as his recordings. One of the biggest issues is the edit on this album; it feels jumbled. It's hard to imagine a worse choice than to end the album in the middle of the first verse of "Folsom." What?! His sense of humor shooting through his eye for detail is such a draw of his songs. We'll get some exemplary songs for that, but the album as a whole doesn't necessarily have the same strength.

Highlights: "Alma Mater," "Grande Finale," "Luney Tune" Glad Copper's music isn't as one-note as his image. Where I was expecting an early predecessor to, say, Warrant or Bon Jovi, this was firmly early glam. Elton John had just come on the scene, and Bowie put out Ziggy Stardust just a few weeks ago. There's a clarity of purpose to its parody that may be lost on the first impression of Cooper; it's a grotesque of arrested development through the decades, from the greasers to the psych rockers. Like New York Dolls, this is ahead of the curve exploding the fifties if "the curve" is to be Rocky Horror. It is more coarse in its camp than Bowie, for sure. It does also show another influence: Zappa! The digressive monologues and whiplash changes of arrangement have his antagonistic attitude, close to breaking some fourth wall as though someone is fiddling with the radio dial. Speaking of radio noise, the presence of decent mixing suggests some of the egregiously terrible mixing is deliberate -- even if the harsh, fizzy high end on the title track is deliberate, it's still unbearable. Luckily the album gets better. Pleasantly surprised overall.

Highlights: "Fetch the Bolt Cutters," "Rack of His," "For Her" As we pull closer to the present in the list, it gets harder to put albums in full perspective. That only puts more burden of proof on an album, and it's just impossible to see this as historic in any way. It's a decent, samey, forgettable album. The percussion is probably my favorite part. She lays off that goat vibrato mostly. The vocal performance is mostly like if Stevie Nicks only listened to Cab Calloway and Tom Waits. But that's to make any promises about lyricism. The lyrics have some nice earnest well-put moments, but it repeats entire verses or one quarter-clever line forty times because it's so self-impressed and unedited. It also spends most of its time declaring its own outspokenness with minimal follow-through. 'What if I told you Hollywood stars were flawed? What if I told you handsome men were abusive and manipulative?' Well, I sure wish someone was here to convey that poetically. It's hard to represent a rebellious spirit when half the album approaches dogmatic marching chants. The one sort of transcendental thing about this album, where thoughts are felt, is the woundlicking -- Apple cherishing her resentments.

Highlights: "Walls of Sound," "Weeping" There's a fair amount of range, more than you'd expect of a group that calls itself 'experimental' or 'avant garde'. We definitely hear some of Eno here with the gliss touches and sour ambience. 1978 is probably the earliest we're going to get for this use of rhythmic noise, or at least the use of this timbral palette to express this morbid and devastated mood. This was not what people like Daphne Oram or Tom Dissevelt were going for. It is truly and deeply edgy. The purest musical and sociopolitical expression of someone climbing up the walls and snapping their fingernails off in the bricks to fall back to the bottom. And now what. Musically, I'd prefer the people they influenced, Depeche Mode or NIN or even Xiu Xiu, ten times out of ten.

Highlight: "Station to Station," "Word on a Wing," "Stay" Not much to add. I don't buy the hype. It's all over the place in genre and mood without track-to-track cohesion, and Bowie's awkward voice tramples everything in the mix no matter how big the arrangements. The lyrics are remarkably coherent and respectable for someone allegedly at the end of their rope in substance abuse. The lyrics are where this album has the most unity. The dabbling in soul and funk feels better than appropriative or gimmicky. At least another turning point for the guy we should be calling man of many faces over Dylan.

Highlights: "Johnny Ryall," "A Year and a Day" This is a step down from Licensed to Ill. Less energy in the beats and the raps. Some more interesting lines and subjects, like in "Johnny Ryall," but this is not sustained. There are samples in here that get a reaction from me even though they're not used the best, going from Sweet's "Ballroom Blitz" to Zapp and Roger, or mashing up Psycho with Jaws. It ends on a high note, realizing its strengths: the blown out 808s on "Hello Brooklyn" sound prescient of the '10s, and the warped chopping of "A Year and a Day" is daring and disorienting in a fun way. Beastie Boys did have a knack for trippy tracks.

Highlights: "All I Need," "Takeover," "Blueprint" Musically, probably most important as Kanye's big break and a major showcase for Just Blaze. The other things that make it historic are regrettable. Jay-Z's confidence is a double-edged sword. It's the thing that allows him his smooth flow, coasting on internal rhyme schemes that get there when they get there, breaking lines unbothered by expectations so long as he has enough double-take compound rhymes to tie things off. It can be excellent. But it's also the thing that prevents him from revising stuff that's laughably bad. All of "Girls, Girls, Girls" is a disaster, but two main things there represent his biggest flops: it has aged extremely terribly, and sometimes he just - oops! - forgets to rhyme. See the end for my list of personal favorite atrocities. This isn't just a lyric problem; it's a thematic or argumentative problem. This album is where Jay-Z really stakes out this neoliberal third way curatorial position about what hip-hop is for, particularly with "U Don't Know," "Izzo," and "Renegade." As he sees it, it's impossible for black people to sell out -- that's just aspirational. Getting your money right, helping yourself, *is* helping others. The biggest issue is not the position in itself, but how he addresses the listener. When he says he dealt drugs so others wouldn't have to, it's hard to see what he means. How does that work? If they buy into the cargo cult and blow a check on the bottle of Army and a Roc bucket that his music is made to advertise, are they then uplifted? Are they building their worth by purchasing his grindset anthems? This will spare them from the drug life that he mentions he will never stop living because it pays so well? The things that are supposed to elevate the album thematically end up undermining it. But you could definitely say it's historically important for this. It's a position Kanye would spend the next twenty years running into the ground. Best dumb lyrics: "Cops want to knock me, D.A. wants to box me/ in But somehow, I beat them charges like Rocky" "Not guilty/ he who does not feel me is not real to me/ therefore he doesn't exist/ So poof, vamoose, son of a bitch" "To try and to fail, the two things I hate Succeed and this rap game, the two things that’s great" [You can tell he hates trying cause he wrote this] "you now lookin at the forty million dollar boy/ I’m rapin’ Def Jam ’til I’m the hundred million man" "if the record's two mil I'm just tryna move three/ Get a couple chicks, get ’em to try to do E/ Hopefully they’ll ménage before I reach my garage" "We was together on the block since free lunch We shoulda been together havin’ Four Seasons brunch" "Niggas pray and pray on my downfall But every time I hit the ground, I bounce up like roundball" I BOUNCE UP LIKE ROUNDBALL!!! ROUNDBALL!!!

Highlights: "Martha My Dear," "Blackbird," "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," "Helter Skelter" I wouldn't call White Album jumping the shark, but it's definitely at the point where they had a right to be up their own ass and have no quality control. The majority of songs on here are like gags or quaint diversions. Some of these try a new direction -- you know, the awful ones, like "Ob-La-Di." The quality songs, some of their best, mainly revisit styles that have worked for them before. A lot of the rockers are the weaker songs: as heavy as "Yer Blues" is, it overstays its welcome; as strong as the riff on "Monkey" is, it's uneven as a song. It's weird how many of these songs are thrown off by awkward counts, *made* un-catchy, and it's weird how many of them are pointedly old-fashioned, pure kitsch. Even the at times spectacular production winds up as a gimick. The main thing that keeps this album afloat is their charismatic vocal performance. Whether this album can get pinpointed as highly influential or excellent rests on "Helter Skelter." And yeah, maybe that's enough.

Highlights: "What Can I Do," "Hope There's Someone," "Fistful of Love" Anywhere you look, this album hangs on subjective evaluations of Anohni's voice. I agree the vibrato is laid too thick, and we can argue that the rest is moot over that, but more conspicuous to me when it came out was that I had nothing to compare it to (Nina Simone being a clear reference looking back). The way the voice languishes over these lovely, tender piano harmonies convinces me of an entirely knowing, telling arrangement. Unlike many cases of awkward singers with good music, this is an album preoccupied with self-frustration, and the pain of being held to standards you can never meet, even in your own heart. One of the figures of the Weimar's SocDem Prussia that Nazi Germany sought to erase was Magnus Hirschfeld, who leveraged his authority as a physician to advocate, among other causes, for people he dubbed transvestites. He claimed that a common characteristic among the trans women he sheltered and studied was a form of masochism, whether this was a shaping force of their identity or an assimilation of the lifelong social rebuke they experienced. We live in a different time, where trans people at least have the internet to host arguments about dysphoria as a qualifier ("transmedicalism" or "truscum",) but even ten years ago dysphoria would have been seen as a spearhead for trans visibility and public acceptance. The subject could never date the album as it comes from that experience not for some platform but for an incredibly vulnerable catharsis, to save herself. This album is a very clear touchstone for its period, alternating between solidarity anthems and laments of dysphoria that struck a chord with a much broader audience.

Highlights: "Monkey," "I Want Your Sex," "Hand to Mouth" In the scope of stuff we're evaluating, five years is a long time for someone to decide 'you know what, this Michael Jackson fellow might be on to something'. It's a successful synthesis of his heroes' successful acts -- even though Jackson and Prince get unfairly conflated all the time, George Michael does manage to really touch on both. We get bombastic funky gospel and breathy electropop while maintaining the timbre and sharp mixing of Freddie Mercury. And when he actually tries, his lyrics can be as earnest and cutting as any of them. It's not really his fault that his songs take fun hooks and wear out their welcome completely over 5-7 minutes, because that's how '80s electropop worked. But. When people talk about how George Michael influenced '90s boy bands, despite having no distinct stylistic contribution of his own to pop, that's like throwing entire genres of Jackson torchbearers like him under the bus. Bobby Brown? The System? New Edition? Zapp and Rodger? Commissioned? Who? But they're probably not wrong, because George Michael was an industry influence, not a musical one. Like Eminem. Like Elvis. He's a prototype of the Disney turn, an attractive fresh-faced star doing a 180 slut spin, with this disingenuous pretense carried on by Madonna that funk gospel is iconoclasm when that's just where gospel had been at for years. None of the things that made him stand out are an actual accomplishment.

Highlights: "Music," "Don't Tell Me" It's ridiculous to justify how awkward this album is and how terribly it's aged by saying any of this was 'experimental' even by the most mainstream US pop standards. Cher's "Believe" had tested the waters for autotune two years before, and NSYNC was having a blast earlier that year running the gamut of gaudy special effects from ring modulation to step filtering to sequencers and ARP. Madonna has always been derivative, and by this time she's just in over her head, too. Do we care about lyrics? Ideas? Because she pretends to. Laughably absurd lyrical bookends to the album: singing about the bourgeoisie and how "selling out is not my thing" when she is literally Madonna. Can't you just do what every honest sellout does and send audiences glum and bitter putzing dispatches on your barbarism of reflection from the barren apex? Whatever. No good songs, but only four I skipped halfway through out of disgust.

Highlights: "I Gotta Find A Way," "Cloud Nine" It was a step backwards for The Temptations to try to compete over new sounds with James Brown, Sly Stone, and Isaac Hayes. We're a couple years out from 110th Street or Shaft, but you can hear in the lyrics that the psych and funk dabbling is bound up in the dawn of blaxploitation, which is a double-edged sword. The production is also much rougher than their past hits. The strained vocals get raw and awkward mixing, and the Motown style of direct input guitar signal does NOT work with Hendrix effects combos; it's like you can hear the upheaval in Motown Records as they scramble to recover from losing their lead writer and relocate to Los Angeles while maintaining their notoriously grueling production schedules. I can see why this might have been picked as a "progressive" record, but that change was developing without The Temptations. This is jumping the shark on all counts.

Highlights: It's consistent -- take your pick. Let's say "Blitzkrieg Bop," "Havana Affair," and "53rd and 3rd" This does sound pretty fresh without quite being able to put a finger on what sets it apart from other rock at the time. Minimal harmony and rhythm with maximum energy. The bass at the core just hammering the root in eighths as hard as it can all day long. The relentless straight beat of something like Deep Purple but drifting away from any blues backbone into a tight pop package. This won't come across as praise, but in this context it's hard to imagine Devo and everything they influenced without the Ramones. Ramones also dare to be stupid without being as doctrinaire about it. More just cynical. Lyrically, this can work against them; you just have to take it in good faith that whether they're singing about pulp touchstones or singing from the perspective of Nazis, operatives, and bigots, it's all with some jaded detachment. If it's any kind of statement, it's either just exposition or just despair, or both. But the music is the perfect counterbalance. That's punk, dead or alive.

Highlights: "Fancy," "Bootylicious" One of the things this album gets right is polarizing its jams and slow songs on either side of the album. 90s-00s R&B is so hyperactive you don't really want to be jerked back and forth tonally between what are effectively two different styles of music. The beats can be pretty ridiculous at times; I always get a laugh out of all the Scooby-Doo auxiliary percussion in the prechorus of "Say My Name," and here you also have some incredibly goofy stuff like the dog chew toy going off the entire time on "Sexy Daddy" and "Independent Women Pt. 2" superimposing the Carmen theme over a staccato flute and xylophone unison like a Tom and Jerry episode. Unintentionally hilarious. There are problems with Beyonce that extend to Destiny's Child. One is that there's always a gap between her awesome ability and the music she puts out; she compromises more than she needs to for the sake of commercialism. If vocal melismas are the meat of this era's R&B, like guitar solos in 70s-80s rock, Beyonce is strong but safe, like Stevie Ray Vaughan. The most interesting thing you'll hear is an 'outside' riff she uses twice that's lifted off 1998's "The Boy Is Mine" by Brandy & Monica. You're not going to get that kind of excellence here. One way Beyonce does not play it safe is rhythmically. Once you notice it, you can't really unhear how her rapid verse delivery steps all over the beat. I would feel sorry for the producer that tried to quantize and sync all that, but nobody tried. Who's going to tell *Beyonce* that she has to do twenty more takes to stick the landing on each of these? In spite of all these things, by virtue of raw talent and skill, a good standard at the tail end of a golden age for R&B.

Highlights: "The Weatherman," "Pass Me By," "Our Private Life" This album gets credit for seeming to work for a larger concept, exploring humiliation in more ways than one. Letting his wife leave, he brings the public in, cynically giving them the things he knows they want, before tearing them down for showing up at all. Like with the ambivalent romantic attitudes in here, the contradictions feel very intentional, part of the struggles he wants to convey. Jones had long posed a stand for real country against sugarcoated high production schmaltz, but many of this album's highlights and commercial successes stoop to swelling string arrangements and flocking choirs. But if this was a sort of self-destructive choice in its way, throwing away integrity in a crisis of faith, he wasn't wrong about what would happen. People loved to watch him bleed. It's also a fun listen; the dreariness of the various midlife crisis numbers is concise, with some charming sentiments like in "Pass Me By" where love isn't a game anymore, and there's plenty of punctuation with uptempo sardonic numbers. Good performances on top of it all make it a successfully intimate album, which is one of the things that makes country music great.

Highlights: "Slide Away" What else comes to mind for the jangly 60s-retro alt rock sound? Cranberries' "Everybody Else"? 1993. REM's "Automatic"? 1992. Gin Blossoms' "New Miserable Experience"? 1992. Live's "Throwing Copper"? April 1994, four months earlier. Jane's Addiction's "Ritual"? 1990. B-52s' "Cosmic Thing"? 1989. It gets hard to tell what Oasis was supposed to have influenced. And then you hear this album, and it's hard to tell if they've *made* anything. Not every band has to invent a sound, but Oasis doesn't epitomize it either, and they don't even contribute something to it. Its virtue is that the performance and production is not bad most of the time. Categorically a two-star album. Do you wish you had totally inane Beatles lyrics and tired Stones chords but without a single memorable hook or an ounce of originality? Join the club, apparently. But if you're making a point of rating pop albums across history and you give this five stars, stop this listening series and leave this website.

Highlights: "Myxomatosis," "Sail to the Moon," "There, There," "Scatterbrained" This feels more polished than Amnesiac. Besides "Myxomatosis," it's hard to say the band tries anything new, but that's also because they'd been expanding their range for two albums. You can think of earlier companion pieces throughout: "I Might Be Wrong" and "Life in a Glasshouse" for "We Suck Young Blood" or "Wolf at the Door", or "Like Spinning Plates" for "Backdrifts". The lyrics keep up this tendency of theirs to have some kind of remainder, something so specific that it becomes distracting or strains the larger image. Like the cat in "Fitter, Happier" or the lemon in "Right Place," you will get , or a belaboring where the wolf at the door must be a literal kidnapper and nothing else more relatable. The album can drag on highly repetitive climaxes like with "2 + 2 = 5," "Sit Down Stand Up," and "The Gloaming." The slow songs tend to be the real standouts, with stranger harmonies and vocal performances that are just as strong and expressive. It's only because they've had such consistently strong output that we could call this album one of their flops.

Highlights: "Don't Know Why," "Cold, Cold Heart," "Nightingale," "The Nearness of You" Maybe, to read way too much into it, this ends on "The Nearness of You" for a reason. Besides its claim to most of the greatest albums ever made, Blue Note guards its reputation for exacting production, and maybe we could say they were ahead of the curve in foreseeing The Great Clippening and realizing digital production could also be used to make the softest timbres really pop. In other words, Billie Eilish or mumblecore rappers, there was Norah Jones. This is forced, but I'm really scraping to justify this album's inclusion. Otherwise, the drumming on here can be really good; feels more high effort than the other parts. Jones' piano seems mostly to create an interesting harmonic line over the vocals, but that's enough to get interesting covers of stuff like Hank Williams. As a whole, though, it was a slog. You see Waits' and Zorn's drummer and Frisell on a track and the eyebrow raises, but it's somehow even more anodyne than the last track. Just a bunch of studio gladhanding. I was confused about why all the demos in the deluxe edition were more interesting than the songs that actually made it. If we're talking Blue Note's poppier side, I'd rather do something like Donald Byrd.

Highlights: "Turquoise Hexagon Sun," "Telephasic Workshop," "Roygbiv," "Smokes Quantity" You could summarize the album's musical contribution pretty simply as using contemporary beats to frame vintage synthesizers, but its high status is more about the theme or nerve of popular taste they struck on. The samples, in part because they can be absurd, do help evoke the associated use of these sounds in public broadcast interstices. For better it worse, this plants the seed for 'vaporwave' aesthetic fifteen years out. The stylized lo-fi to evoke nostalgia. The gloomy imagination of a liminal space as utopia, where even our fantasies cannot escape contamination by commercial artifacts. In some ways it hasn't aged well, especially the digital stretching near the start when you'd suppose this is all about analog character, but if anything this album is still underrated for the influence it's had on popular taste over such a long period.

Highlights: "Randy Scouse Git," "Band 6," "For Pete's Sake" If you're going to directly copy a band in 1967, who better than the Beatles. It's a convincing duplicate. And these 25-year-old boys even wrote some of the songs themselves this time. That's all there is to say.

Highlights: "Folsom Prison Blues," "Flushed from the Bathroom of your Heart," "25 Minutes to Go," "The Wall" The highlights aren't as good as the San Quentin show, but this is a much more cohesive show with much stronger performances. A high watermark of the development of outlaw country in the '60s. Always a good reference point for any conversation about authenticity in art: people don't ask that songs about them be written by themselves; they want to feel recognized.

Highlights: "Up to Me," "Slipstream" Strong performances from the entire group of a good variety of moods and styles marred by some bizarre and repellent lyrical choices. This is early enough in prog history to compete with Yes, Crimson, and Gentle Giant for claims of influence. But it stands out for being the most unpleasant sheerly from its unrepentant edgelord attitude, from clocking in three songs sympathetic to pedophilia to the closing arc in that British tradition of congratulating yourself as a prophetic revolutionary for dunking on the church. Maybe the biggest thing Tull imparted to future prog acts like Rush, Tool, etc is the undying attitude of preening libertarian faux-intellectualism. You know, the thing everyone hates most about prog.

Highlights: "Pretzel Logic," "Night by Night," "Parker's Band," "Through With Buzz" If we take it as a given that Steely Dan consistently set very high standards in the 70s, from production to performance to lyricism, without ever really having claim to a groundbreaking album, the best way to evaluate their albums is against each other. This is probably one of their best, because it seems to respond to earlier criticism without compromise. Countdown to Ecstasy hadn't done as well as Can't Buy A Thrill, and some of the main criticisms were of the inscrutably personal lyrics and the long jam-based runtimes. Pretzel Logic gives us clear subjects with the same clever lyrical development, detailed and intelligent but playful and catchy, and packing tons of movement for harmonics, groove, and arrangement into two-to-four minute songs. The result holds attention from start to finish on every level of the craft. Exceptional.

Highlights: "Ana," "Rock Music," "Velouria" As hugely influential as they were, Pixies gave what they had to give with Doolittle. This might have better production, more reverb and modulation gloss, but it's much more meandering and slogging with minimal payoff. The modal wonkiness feels wayward, and the punchy repetitions reliably overstay their welcome -- the back-to-back "Hang Wire" and "Stormy Weather" are especially obnoxious. Whatever tightrope they walked before has been lost here.

Highlights: "Remade Horizon," The Bride," "Two Doves," "Temecula Sunrise" Not a bad idea to take ideas from Captain Beefheart and sweeten the deal with the thing he lacked the most: strong performances of stronger vocal arrangements, especially the dazzling ping-pong counterpoint on "Remade Horizon". You also get swelling strings in daring modern harmonies and lots of glittering guitar hammer-ons and pull-offs reminiscent of Malian blues with a twist of veering chromaticism. The main problem isn't so much Longstreth's strangled goose voice (again, better than Beefheart any day). It's really his lyrical fishtailing between jarringly stupid banality and megalomaniacal pretentiousness. This guy has himself staring into Nietzsche's eyes in the album art but sings stuff like "what hits the spot yeah like Gatorade? you and me baby hitting the spot all night." The name of the album, "bitte orca," repeated throughout the bridge of "Useful Chamber," is just his response to 'cellar door,' a pair of words he champions as being exceptionally beautiful. Please. Also, Amber Coffman's voice is very mainstream on the surface, but regularly becomes unbearably piercing and harsh, like a grotesque of its first impression. Besides the consistently interesting music, this is a good time capsule for the '00s boom in internet-driven college kid pop: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Highlights: "I'm So Young," "She Knows Me Too Well," "Please Let Me Wonder" The breakthrough album where the boy band discovered the songwriting power of Being Sad. Jokes aside, Side A is more bearable than the stereotypical Beach Boys record, with the shrill falsetto kept to a minimum, but the downbeat Side B is where this album really shines. As easy as is it to parody them, as much fame and influence as they've enjoyed, you can still find something you've never heard before.

Highlights: "Mother Nature," "I Ain't Got Nothin'," "Run Charlie Run," "Funky Music Sho Nuff Turns Me On" The Temptations had an uphill battle to assimilate funk from the sound of 1969's Cloud Nine, but this is a real breakthrough. Better mixing, better performances, and better lyrics put them up there at the head of the genre.

Highlights: "Date Stamp," "Valentine's Day," "Show Me," "Tears Are Not Enough" Although running behind Prince, Duran Duran, and Genesis, this album comes in early for its particular blend of disco, funk, and electropop. It beats Bowie there anyway, although it's obviously indebted to his range of vocal deliveries. It's consistent in the feel and energy while having enough variety to keep things fresh, but the production can also be frenetic, dumping jarring one-off gimmick fills in the middle of the mix and doubling down on weak falsettos with blatant boosts and reverb ramps. The lyrics have glimmers of intelligence that are mostly bent in service of vindictive breakup slop. It's way too salty overall, but there are moments of campy conflation between romance and commercialism that hold up alright, a snarky perspective where everything is objectified. Not bad for its time, but almost everything about it has aged poorly.

Highlights: "You Sent Me Flying" Winehouse is very up front about her neo-soul influences, which is more than I can say for all the people who've been praising her for twenty years when I'm only discovering this now. She has good musical ideas in homage to those influences, backed up by a ton of vocal talent. Main drawback might be the constant riffing and very wordy lyrics that can make it seem unfocused. The content sours it too. When her candor is supposed to be her selling point, it doesn't exactly scream girl power or strength and independence to open by calling your boyfriend gay because you wish he was more controlling, or to gloat over the failure of other women in "Fuck Me Pumps". But the album is musically a worthy entry for her to the tradition.

Highlights: "Blister in the Sun," "Prove My Love," "Kiss Off," "To the Kill" Legitimately shocking that this came out in 1983, and that the vocal performances contain the entire bag of tricks seemingly directly copied by Frank Black, who would go on to be cited as one of the most influential artists of 90s rock. Still, Pixies did have their own contributions and ultimately made better songs and albums, in part because -- believe it or not -- their lyrics tended to be less scandalous. If you were put off by the lyrical content of Violent Femmes' hit single about pervert junkies, don't worry: almost the entire album spends its time dancing around the promotion of sexual assault! I mean, holy hell. Still, incredibly prescient and a clear link from Velvet Underground and Captain Beefheart to grunge and alt.

Highlights: "The Idiot Bastard Son," "Mom and Dad," "Lonely Little Girl," "Mother People" One of the best Zappa albums and the best introduction even when throroughly marred by its tinny mixing and antagonistic jolts of interrupting noise, because its songs are nearly the only attempt the band made at being lyrically serious. The constantly surprising moments of real musical beauty feel hard-fought in a dramatically intentional way, breaking through brutal and caustic bipartisan mockery. Beyond the seemingly sincere left-libertarianism neighboring the hippies in "Take Your Clothes Off," the frustrated vacuum of any hopeful, positive vision for society makes the music the position, and the music shows you it means it. It's incredible that in '67-'68, in an era known for pop genre-bending, experimentation, and free-thinking, this series of albums from the Mothers would still have been like a bolt out of the blue, maybe only surpassed by the decade's world-historic works of jazz.

Highlights: "IIB" I try to avoid any argument for an album from backstory, but the main justification for me would be that someone can claim it's *what* you're hearing. In this case, you're hearing a master performer adapt to create something for a specific difficult object. That's more of what John Cage had in mind than whatever industry gossip tells you about an artist's mental state or personal life during an album's production, or even its political climate and public reaction. I don't have the musical knowledge to nail down specific revelations this album could give us. Maybe we could say a characteristic of Davis alumni was searching for continuity without decisive key centers, and this is one more adventure of that kind. I wonder how Jarrett feels about the success of this album. A lot of its success is a conversation starter from its backstory about constraints and suffering in artistic process, and my main takeaway is question as well: if an artist sees fit to take up improvisation, do they accept that one day their greatest work will just move through them athwart all their intentional career?

Highlights: "NY," "The Sulphur Man" Sounds remarkably like an edgier version of Coldplay's arena-rock turn seven months before they got there when it's not busy sounding like a laughable knockoff of Amnesiac or OK Computer. The studio tricks here are way overdone; you'll get five seconds of an instrument right in front of the mix and never hear it again, or 100% mix delay bludgeoning the actual song out of focus. Maybe it has a claim to being influential from back in 2002, but all of its pieces are just stepping stones to a sound that is ultimately anodyne and bland without those charismatic vocals to save it.

Highlights: "Concrete Jungle," "Gangsters," "Nite Klub" It's good that a seminal ska-punk act, with compelling intros, hooks, and vocals, also knows how not to be appropriative way back in '79. Jamaican, Cuban, and British members each speak as themselves to their shared situations. But. If we're caring about the politics of the songs, because that's part of punk music, it absolutely trips on the finish line.

Highlights: Take your pick; it's consistent. This is probably here because Motorhead never had a standout album and because their music is known for high energy that a live show will build on. It's mostly successful, but rough mixing and wear on Lemmy's vocals bring it down. The way Motorhead sits timbrally and rhythmically between rock, punk, and metal has aged really well; it's pretty much how mainstream rock ended up sounding. If this is being used as a lifetime achievement pick from the list editors, we should give the band its due.

Highlights: "Crosstown Traffic," "Electric Ladyland," "All Along The Watchtower," "Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)" Probably not much development from the '67 albums to this. You know: dom7#9! Wah-wah! A sexy wizard gave me a moon crystal that gives me psychic love power! Lots of interminable saggy spots here over 75 minutes. However, with how much play his bluesier stuff gets, it's good to hear so many melodic psych hooks in that same great univibe strat tone. It's easy to imagine Hendrix becoming a glam guy if he'd made it through the '70s. Didn't realize how much effective use of unison there would be here, and the bass was really dynamic for some of the openers. Trim this down to half its size and you have a perfect album.

Highlights: "Black Hole Sun," "Fell On Black Days," "Spoonman," "The Day I Tried to Live," "Mailman" One of the strongest 90s grunge albums. Picks up both Pixies' uneven measure schemes and Alice in Chains' southern gothic dissonance and dynamic extremes in vocal performance, while adding a more competent use (or affect) of Indian musical ideas than their 60s psych predecessors. The lead guitar is the weakest part of the album, but the rhythm section is excellent. Lyrically, Cornell has this pattern of being very coherent and incisive when he's writing something depressive, which is most of the time, but almost completely nonsensical when he's trying to be upbeat. In other words, the slow-burners tend to be just as strong as the rockers.

Highlights: "Song 2," "M.O.R.," "Death of a Party," "Chinese Bombs," "Strange News from Another Star" The big contradiction of this album: if the guitar is so explosively noisy on this album, beyond New Wave or "Post-Punk" influences and on par with '00s-'10s garage, full of splattered oscillation and warping modulation, then why does it feel so sleepy? Is it because it's hung up on tired Bowie jam cadences? Is it because Albarn's laconic voice is mixed above anything and everything? Excessive runtime diluting the exciting solos and opening hooks that never reappear? Not sure, but except for its hit single, even at its best, this album drags. Maybe the band's stylistic compromise was a good idea, but that alone wouldn't make this a strong or influential album so late in the development of both alt/grunge and Britpop.

Highlights: "Light My Fire," "The Crystal Ship," "End of the Night" I do reckon the main contribution musically is putting the organ so forward. There were other bands doing "Early Beatles but Spooky with an Organ" by this time, like The Zombies in '65. ADoors was really spamming that one minor key modal interchange through the album here; maybe they could call that their harmonic signature. It's professional performances across the board, if a little stiff. That just leaves their extremely divisive reputation on a lyrical basis. Do we think this guy who wrote "Twentieth Century Fox" screaming about statuatory rape in "Back Door Man" is a Great American Poet? Is "drive the snake to the lake" more William Blake or Dr. Seuss? It is ridiculous to argue that Morrison was a full CIA plant to sink the antiwar movement with drug culture propaganda, but that legend has the spirit right; this guy's dad started the Vietnam War, and all he had to say for himself when he worked up the nerve to become a public figure was this offer of a freewheeling doctrine of endless interiority, ie an odyssey ten thousand leagues up their collective asses.

Highlights: "Mirage," "Overground," "Jigsaw Feeling" As influential as this band was, they needed time to work out the sound. Specifically, they need McGeoch's guitarwork to bring some melodic interest, because Siouxsie tends to cling to a single note in her money range like her life depended on it. There are radical choices here, but minimal development or variation over the course of a song. It's almost all dreary drawn-out syncopated droning, with the unfortunate exception of the glitter of shockingly racist kitsch on "Hong Kong Garden". At least, this is a clear step from Patti Smith's gonzo secular ceremonies towards more bearable developments in genres that barely exist like New Wave and Post Punk.

Highlights: "Higgle-Dy Piggle-Dy," "I Hate You," "Oh How to Do Now," "Shut Up" What a great surprise! This is indistinguishable from what West Coast noise garage was trying to do over the '00s-'10s. It was always already there. Most punk of the next twenty years sounds tame by comparison. It would be hard to recommend people the album because it opens with its weakest material, but it was so far ahead of the curve for what popular audiences would grow to enjoy. Barely registers now as 'experimental' or 'provocateur'. It just rips.

Highlights: "White Winter Hymnal," "Ragged Wood," "Tiger Mountain Peasant Song," "He Doesn't Know Why," "Meadowlarks," "Blue Ridge Mountains" In 2008 in Collegeville, Minnesota you could not escape this album. People were obsessed. The big vocal harmony was kind of a revival of CSNY and Beach Boys sounds for Fleet Foxes and Grizzly Bear, respectively, given more posturing dreaminess. These guys seemed to win out, probably because they resonated more with the aesthetics of the Big Box Praise & Worship Mill. I guess I don't know if CSNY's harmonies got as 'close' as some of the ones here, drawing from classical or medieval ideas. At the same time, it's funny how high the self-regard is here; the liner notes are dilettantish, like "we would like to thank Claude Debussy, Igor Stravinsky..." I see some criticisms like 'instrumental stuff too spare' and there's some truth to that. The vocal work is plenty interesting but there is a lot of hokier pentatonics bridging the fun ideas and extremely lame guitar lines. It was funny to see someone say "this is bourgeois farmer cosplay" sandwiched between two comments saying "ah this takes me back to Santa Monica" and "ah this takes me back to Ottowa" so apparently not far off, but I think the choice of Bruegel for the cover is sufficient rebuff of that reductive potshot. I like this one. Really familiar with it and the fact that I have a hard time narrowing to four highlights probably means I should cave and call it excellent. Doesn't need to pay for the sins of trends it inspired: the blithe, reverb-drenched, baroquey-folky acoustic pop that would fill a decade of commercial slots alongside the mimics of White Stripes and Coldplay.

Highlights: "Breakdown," "Strangered in the Night," "Luna" The main things that set this apart from where the Eagles were at, and all that that implies, are the vanishing glissando synth accents, splashes of glam like on the opener, shorter average runtimes, and Petty's voice. Petty's voice is beyond parody, an amorphous combination of every word-chewing pseudo-accent ever discovered. To today's listener, it's Adam Sandler, Counting Crows, The Cars, Billy Corgan, Dire Straits, Bob Dylan, etc. The songs are well-studied and tight syntheses of Bowie, Springsteen, punk, and pop country, with every space in the mix stuffed with some kind of flair, but in one of the greatest years pop music ever had, this album is beneath notice.

Highlights: "Swimsuit Issue," "Drunken Butterfly," "Wish Fulfillment," "JC" This is what I expected Sonic Youth to sound like when trying out Daydream Nation and Goo: a mix of Glenn Branca (eg 1982's Ascension) with all the New Wave stuff to which it was responding. I don't think it's accurate to just say this was Sonic Youth being influenced by grunge, because what they're doing here is predictive of the edgy uptempo rock that would run through the decade until nu metal rap-rock took over.

Highlights: "Reynardine," "Farewell, Farewell," "Medley: The Lark in the Morning" This may be several years after S&G's iconic cover of "Scarborough Fair," but that performance should have invited many deserving acts like this. More than the American duo, this compelling lead vocalist is in touch with traditional style. This also has to be one of the most graceful and grounded approaches of Indian affect in '60s pop, appealing to hippie aesthetic by establishing simple commonalities between two distinct traditions. The original opener is weak, and the other original marrs strong instrumentals with contrived adolescent drama, but the album is otherwise a great success at everything it seems to be trying to do: bridge traditional styles to new audiences and persuasively express a romantic hippie pastoral.

Highlights: "Duke of Earlsfield," "Tow Truck," "Jacob Street 7 am" I think electronic music forces me to ask a question that I should also be asking with electric music: is it the user or the tool that's breaking new ground? And here I think it's neither. What I hear characterizing this album is fast envelope/LFO movement and really intense resonance/flanging, both for percussive effect, some super fast trem bordering on ring, and panning of complementary rhythmic delays. These would have been available for a long time, and I have to believe there would have been some 70s Moog people doing the same things. "Chapel Street Market 9 am" sounds extremely Mort Garson to me with the exception that it replaces a bonky ringmod bossa nova beat with hissing uptempo straight beat like Tangerine Dream had done. It's combining these with dub that might be new, or at least fashionable. "Theme" is very much 90s action movie swagger. But it could be more cohesive then, and it just feels like one thing after another. And if you go back just one year to stuff like Orbital and μ-Ziq's releases, it really dashes any good faith left for Haunted Dancehall. Electronic music back then wasn't all this stiff and spare. You can actually have fun with it. Just not this one.

Highlights: "The Perfect Kiss," "Sub-Culture," "Face Up" Musically it’s like if the worst aspects of The Smiths teamed up with the worst aspects of Bruce Springsteen and Duran Duran. Most of the album is so cringey not just because of the weak vocal performance, or how every member of the band seems to be dead set on ignoring everybody else, especially those dawdling guitar lines like something a child would play, but also because most of the lyrics are transparently evasive. It's full of this whining voice forcing inflated, obtuse non-descriptions of all these grievances in a relationship where he’s obviously the problem. It’s at its best when its more literal and direct, which happens to be when it’s about self-loathing, particularly the closers. I can see this having a similar appeal in the 80s to what Xiu Xiu did later; lyrically, it’s like if Xiu Xiu didn’t have problems and was just covering Taylor Swift subjects. Even in its own time, this is a hi-fi version of an album you could grab for free from a local band playing Tuesdays in a pool hall. Its popularity doesn't seem to owe much to its derivative and awkward sound, but to the fact that the world is full of toxic, self-pitying losers.

Highlights: "River Man," "Three Hours," "Cello Song" Drake had found himself musically from this debut, granted a couple pieces sound very similar and rote. It's the lyrics that aren't there yet. The lyrics are too lazy, repetitive, needy, and self-impressed to have the same impact that Pink Moon would have later. As much as he moans here, he hadn't really learned to be vulnerable yet. The only thing that separates this from a Donovan record is some glimmers of compelling harmony and a beautifully gentle voice. That's plenty, but it wasn't this artist's potential.

Highlights: "He's Always There," "Happenings Ten Years' Time Ago," "Lost Women," "What Do You Want" I wish I had heard this before Byrds' Fifth Dimension, which was released a few days later. This is an equally creative album, but the performances and songwriting are superior from front to back. I can't think of any other band that was striking this balance between Monks-level noise and studio professionalism; they do a few rote pop songs, but The Beatles and Stones would be apples and oranges here. The closer seems like something Black Sabbath was transparently working from in retrospect. A strong album that seems like it would have been highly influential.

Highlights: "The Day After the Revolution," "I'm a Man" If you wished you had the completely artless lyricism of New Order but also reeking of slavering midlife crisis perversion, all performed with the moaning dribble of The National, look no further. More often than not completely repugnant. The constant gamble of its nihilist candor is right twice a day with stuff like the penultimate song, and there are interesting heavy instrumental moods that are regularly ruined by the foreground. That's the nice thing to say. Incredible that anyone could recommend or praise this without dying of shame.

Highlights: "River Euphrates," "Where Is My Mind," "Gigantic," "Broken Face" Pixies on top of their formula: odd measures of even beats to keep the song moving, intense vocals, minimal and dissonant riffs and hooks. The production has the rawness of a demo while sneaking in effective touches like overdubbing pans of Black's different takes of screams or a final warp of modulation. Even though they owe a ton to Violent Femmes, this is the rise of that band's vicarious influence over all of rock. Just not quite at the peak of Doolittle.

Highlights: "I'm Looking Through You," "You Won't See Me," "Drive My Car," "Norwegian Wood" Everything has been said, but just to cast my vote: one of the Beatles' absolute best, with one foot in their old sound and one in the new. They seemed to accumulate styles over time, and by now we have a nice diverse blend of '50s rock, Byrds, Dylan, jokey ragtime, Paul's chamber dabbling, and sparkles of their emerging take on 'psych'. It also has some of their clearest, most balanced songwriting, with lots of material that manages to handle negative emotions, powerfully expressed, in a suitably upbeat musical mood. We only got a few like this before they flew all the way up their own asses forever. It's too bad it trips so hard at the finish line with "Run for your Life," which with hindsight about John Lennon's abuse is totally abhorrent. "Norwegian Wood" is notoriously ominous in this way too. Again, fuck John Lennon. Otherwise, maybe not especially influential in its own right among their catalogue, but a standard of pop excellence.

Highlights: "Waiting in Vain," "Exodus," "Jamming," "The Heathen" It seems like this album stands out for adding higher production to the sound Marley had developed over the past decade. The keys and synths are especially strong compared to the earlier albums, although all the elements sound great -- the vocals, the drums, etc. It could be released today to equal success. It holds the genre in a resilient, timeless place. It does also feel, though, like this album achieved broader success by walking back Marley's political messages to some more universal (vague) material that flatters both the WASP and the secular consumerist -- the exceptions are the most musically awkward piece, "So Much Things to Say," and of course, the songs that assert fornication as a religious imperative. It's just a bizarre position for most non-Rasta listeners. I'm not sure it's a good sign that this album is the source of most of his hits, because even as so much material here can win you over, a lot of those hits are the kind of blithe material that causes people to write off reggae in the first place.

Highlights: "I Can't Sleep," "There She Goes," "Feelin'," "Way Out" Strong entry for seminal 90s retro-60s pop rock, lighter and later than Stone Roses but with some really smart song structures and sold well by the gruff vocal delivery of some surprisingly agile, flutelike melodies. In that last quality, it's also a great and faithful synthesis of Stones and Beatles that makes their tropes sound fresh. Maybe the sequence could use revision, as the album loses energy and drags and dwindles in the final stretch.

Highlights: "Welcome to the Working Week," "Alison," "Less Than Zero," "Pay It Back" Honestly hard to pick highlights. Every song is memorable, with striking left-turn harmonic fluorishes and hooks that give precise impact to the cutting lyrics. I noticed how often I couldn't really scan how a lyric was going to be read, or I needed the riff to hit to realize its tenor or meaning. It's deliberate, tight, holistic songwriting at work, again and again in a exciting range of styles with bracing, expressive vocal performance. Too bad it's mainly in service of sleazy GQ dispatches.

Highlights: "Heads Will Roll," "Zero," "Shame and Fortune" The Siouxsie and the Banshees cover band get a makeover with sterile '00s club sounds. Thrill as the frontwoman bludgeons you to death with repetitive yowling over sleepwalking pentatonic exercises. Guaranteed you've never heard this much vocal fry in life. But fear not! It's also mostly interminable straight-to-commercial adolescent ballads. Awful. Mistakenly put here for its hit single.

Highlights: "Message in a Bottle," "Bring on the Night," "The Bed's Too Big Without You," "Walking on the Moon" The hits are the hits on this one; the album is super uneven, and you can hear a surprising amount of awkward prog influence on here. But that also seems like a secret to this band's success: they weren't just jumping on the ska train fairly early on, but synthesizing some jazz and pop ideas, and doing it well.

Highlights: "Sunshine of Your Love," "Dance the Night Away," "Tales of Brave Ulysses," "SWLABR" I'm pleasantly surprised by the bardic vibrato in two-part vocal harmony, namey with "Dancing". I thought that was a Bowie signature, but he would have taken cues from this. It definitely represents much of Homme's investment in psych as well, for a contemporary rock reference point of this band's extensive influence. Things like "Ulysses" and "Sunshine" are undeniably proto-Sabbath and subsequent metal, too. Hot on the heels of Hendrix for forays into a heavy new psych sound departing from both blues and boy band rock.

Highlights: "Up Around the Bend," "Who'll Stop the Rain," "Travelin' Band," "Run Through the Jungle" This album really drags for almost all of the first half before it gets going. A resolute step backwards from Bayou Country. The arrangements can be really rich, and their production has stepped up, but the songwriting has definitely suffered from their grueling output.

Highlights: "Tragedy," "Red Dirt Girl," "My Baby Needs a Pearl" The lyrics are so dramatic that they need more grounded production. It would be hard to have production *less* grounded. Having the space age pitch shifted P+W reverb trails on this with the AIPAC exotica beatz is way too much. It really needed to be her alone in a room or something similar. Some of the sentiments ring true, but I get the nagging feeling that this is her overtly trying to be Leonard Cohen and just giving us lazy expositions of Cohen with a bunch of mystical hooey on top. This is on the list because gormless media tastmakers love whenever a "country" artist does some nominal performative left politics like "the bible DOESN'T tell me so", insofar as country is basically a floating ethnic category like "R&B". She lands some good punches in any given song, but it's a long album for this much moaning over music that is also moaning while also horrendously overwrought.

Highlights: "The Man I Love," "I Got Rhythm,""Fascinating Rhythm," "But Not For Me" Gershwin could never be a fitting representation of Ella. This is apparently from the revised album list too; they didn't have her at all originally. They could have at least cut Armstrong in, also originally excluded. It doesn't matter if the Gershwins had some interesting hits and cool harmony; their lyrics are infantalizing trash, so everyone will naturally focus on her performance over the songwriting. If they were even trying to give a one-off representation of her accomplishments, they would do '54's Lullabies of Birdland because there's a consensus behind her performance of Goodman's "Flying Home". Something from the height of her career. But they're not trying. Ella undoubtedly belongs among the highlights of any Anglophone music survey and deserves much better than such a gormless, tacky pick.

Highlights: "Comin' Back to Me," "Embryonic Journey," "White Rabbit," "DCBA-25" Probably the best encapsulation of 60s pop music we're going to get, in that it's competently performed but transparently derivative. Like if Sonny and Cher did Beatles, Stones, Dylan, Zombies, and Doors. That is on a lyrical level, too, with as much inconsistency in quality as you'd expect. Not really blown away by Slick's performance -- the harsh vibrato and liberal portamento is a little annoying. The vocal harmonies work best for them. Maybe the bigger issue is how tonally inconsistent it is, the way it progresses from bold rock jams to blithe pretentious pop-folk creeds but ends on whack blues numbers. It's like hearing a cult coalesce and go off the rails in fast forward -- which it was.

Highlights: "Country Girl," "Deja Vu," "Teach Your Children," "Woodstock" Seems like a real development from CSN. The arrangements are fuller, and the production improved, and it maintains the strengths of that last album. They know when to linger on a musical idea and how to create new interest as one wears out its welcome. The lyrics tend to be memorable, meaningful, and not too overwrought. And of course the vocal harmonies are iconic. Excellent all around.

Highlights: "Schizophrenia," "Catholic Block," "Pacific Coast Highway," "White Cross" As the band's alleged breakthrough album, you can hear its sense of harmony past grunge and artists like Beck into 21st-century acts like Deerhoof, Battles, and Women. But it's still starved for satisfying melody, and I can't honestly say it's a clean break from New Wave tropes into something else -- more a development from Evol by way of exaggeration. As far as highly influential bands go, this might be one where "you had to be there," because looking back through its influences the flaws seem to stick out most. Sonic Youth may be exceptional as the most influential band without a truly great album -- or without even one truly great song.

Highlights: "Mambo Sun," "Jeepster," "Bang a Gong," "Rip Off" T-Rex might have some innovation to its name, in this space before there was a definitive sense of disco as a separate genre against which racist rock fans could draw a line. I was curious about how close Bowie was in 1971 to this blend of rock and uptempo soul, but thumbing through Hunky-Dory it sounds closer to Beatles still. The problem is it's all just jams, however good their central idea is. All slightly overlong. I can kind of block out the delirious, delusional Led Zeppelin porno psych lyrics, but not the slimy goblin vocal delivery. Definitely hear the good and the bad of Castleface artists here, who were overtly influenced by this band. The closer is actually probably my favorite; want to spend time hanging out on that progression, and the dramatic final sostenuto is one of the best I've heard in a rock album.

Highlights: "Relax," "Krisco Kisses," "Black Night White Light," "The Only Star in Heaven" The main thing this band has going for it is the vocalist and some cool bass parts. It warms up near the end but there are samey stretches, lyrics that manage to be both really pretentious and really dumb, and a couple covers that have no reason to exist. As strong as the vocals are, they do not meet Springsteen on "Born to Run" or Dionne Warwick on "San Jose" per Bacharach. It's hard to say how much this band adds to what Duran Duran or ABCs had put down a few years ago. The good ideas don't hold up their respective songs all the way.

Highlights: "Get Innocuous," "Someone Great," "Watch the Tapes," "New York I Love You" Murphy is very transparent about this being a midlife crisis revival of his favorite sounds, but it's ridiculous that people give him so much credit just for having good taste in what he regurgitates. Yes, we all wish there was another '80s record of Talking Heads, Bowie, Eno, or U2. The thing is, nobody ever wished for an album of Bono trying to sing like Byrne, or Byrne trying to write completely direct and literal lyrics about his opinions and feelings. The lyrics don't have a real sense of rhythm to make them anthemic or even catchy, which is critical if you're going to repeat them one hundred times. The most surprising, interesting moment in here is the end of the opener, which might just be a sample of Ben Johnston's "With Solemnity" or something by Ades or Britten. For a moment I thought there was some inspiration, but it might be just one more echo in his chamber.

Highlights: "N.I.B.," "Black Sabbath," "Evil Woman" Similar feelings to their sophomore: they keep it simple but tight, with a caveat for the panned overdubbing of guitar solos that's still to good effect. Drop-C tuning would have sounded super fresh, and strong vocal performance here too. This doesn't have the same studio gimmicks as Paranoid to spruce it up, but the lyricism is a little stronger here if just because it trades in horror cliche without so many egregiously dumb rhyme schemes. May be a little more bluesy, like they haven't quite found their voice yet. Still a strong debut for some working-class guys. Good for them.

Highlights: "Moonlight in Vermont," "Stardust," "Blue Skies," "Someone to Watch Over Me" It was a different time that you could go multiplatinum off a cover album. Or not; Nelson defied critical and commercial expectations about what people want and proved them all wrong. Good arrangements, comfortable performances. I don't know that any of these pieces were wanting for his performance, but it's interesting to hear a country guy assimilate plenty of harmonic suspense like whole tone and major-minor or augmented chords. I can't really read his outlaw persona into this, and maybe that's what fans liked so much; maybe it felt cathartic to hear him indulge in more fanciful songs. In itself, it feels banal and mawkish. You know, a sellout album.

Highlights: "Know," "War?," "Ddevil," "CUBErt" In retrospect, this might stick out as an early example of actual experienced musicians learning and performing ideas from 'nu metal,' which had already seen several of its biggest stars reach their peak albums. There are overtly Korn songs (Know, Mind), overtly Deftones songs (Suggestions, War) overtly Tool songs (Spiders), but all of them are sharp homages. These bands define all the mainstream influence on SoaD we could otherwise attribute further back to Sonic Youth and Primus, and you can also see post-Zorn Mr. Bungle being a huge influence as the original klezmer and middle-eastern exotica metal group. In other words, it's the Jefferson Airplane of pop metal! For better or for worse. The only thing really holding it back are some of the most obnoxiously stupid lyrics you will ever hear, too awkward and specific to fall into usual metal angst, but still too cliche to get written off as psychedelic ranting, and delivered with unavoidable clarity from Serj's powerful and nasal vocals. What makes them divisive is how far people are willing to overlook this for the otherwise very professional performances. Because if we're honest, the songcraft of the genre it was curating had already set the bar very, very low.

Highlights: "Don't Fall Down," "Kingdom of Heaven," "Splash 1," "Roller Coaster" Comes a few months after Fifth Dimension and Revolver, by which I mean it doesn't quite get the good faith praise of trying new things. "Don't Fall Down" is the most creative and interesting track, on par with the prescient harmonic forays of the Byrds. It almost sounds like a contemporary lo-fi indie hit. Too bad it's ruined by the constant "electric jug" work that's literally just a guy chattering "doodoodoodoo" nonstop, and the last minute wailing session like every other track. This guy beat Robert Plant to the achievement of sounding like a cat with hernia. Actually, scratch that -- these guys predicted Yoko Ono, which makes them prophetic geniuses.

Highway: "Highway Star," "Pictures of Home," "Smoke on the Water," "Space Truckin'" Consistently excellent performers. The songs tend to be more downbeat and groovy than on In Rock a few years ago, with a little more dithering and drag in the middle, but the keyboardist definitely comes through as feeling himself on this album: loud, distorted wurlitzer with the most inspired solos in the group for a clear standout. And the opener is probably the best song they ever had.

Highlights: "Laughing," "Moral Kiosk," "9-9," "Shaking Through" It definitely increases my esteem to realize how early this band was and to hear them in a more enthusiastic, impulsive phase. I never made the connection between REM and '80s New Wave before, but that makes so much sense. It really works to bring a lot of acoustic instrumentation into an otherwise closely New Wave style album like this. It's wild to think that an iconically "80s" group like The Smiths was taking cues from REM. But there's plenty of diversity here, too. "9-9" has all the tropes of '00s instrumental bands. To offer criticism, even in this raw form they can feel sluggish because of the song structures. There's a deliberate choice to alternate between two (elaborate, thoughtful) sections over and over and over to focus on these minimal *lyrical* variations. I had to check online to make sure they weren't just repeating the same verses. That seems like their deliberate process, to slow psychy free-association down to a dreamlike crawl and elicit a sense of wonder, keep listeners convinced that they'll arrive somewhere ruminating on the words. I just read through a New Yorker interview with Stipe where he distinguishes two periods of the band's songwriting, between '83-90 and afterwards. He doesn't use the phrase "erotic irony," but he definitely talks around the theory with phrases like "useful obscurity" -- to try to nail down and define a feeling even just for yourself would actually rob you of its expression, and obligate you to cliches and sentimentality. Their sense of political frustration eventually threw that principle out. I respect the decision, but as a musical experience it doesn't pay off. Ultimately, glad to be proven wrong. Important for anyone who grew up in the twilight of their career to reevaluate them through this early work.

Highlights: "How D'You Ride," "Gudbye T'Jane," "Mama Weer All Crazee Now" Begrudging praise for its clear influence and lots of strong craftsmanship. The combination of Queen production techniques with ACDC vocals before either of those bands existed would have ripped my head off in 1972. Predates New York Dolls by a year too, a very similar rock style with very different guitarwork. There's some super sharp work by the band on here that just gets ruined repeatedly by the singer's inability to vamp or jam without losing his touch. Every time he tries to riff in the last minute of every song it completely ruins it. Never had a bigger whiplash than going from that scorching opener to the second song, legitimately one of the worst things I've ever heard. The sound is consistent, but the quality isn't. Extremely uneven album.

Highlights: "Kick Your Game," "Waterfalls," "Red Light Special," "Take Our Time" You just cannot talk about the teeny bopper superstars of the next ten years without this album. The direct influence on Britney Spears especially is undeniable. What's funny is the changes from late 80s pop are so subtle; there are relics of electropop lying around for sure, like the comical vocaloid portamento on "Diggin on You". Maybe their cover of Prince is telling. Maybe it's the envelope funk timbres and heavy tempos that gave it a fresh feel, or the heavy use of jazzy sampling that wouldn't feel out of place in ATCQ. That said, not even close to a masterpiece album. You can tell production was chaotic, and the strong sense of style doesn't prevent songs from dithering in cheap sleaze. Very uneven, but definitely a turning point for pop music.

Highlights: \"Light Flight,\" \"Train Song,\" \"Hunting Song,\" \"House Carpenter\" Might win out over Liege and Leaf for the highlight of this genre in this year. The performances aren't always as tight, but the original songs are better written and more frequent, and the music is more ambitious. You definitely get a sense of how \"folk rock\" informed prog with this album, and yet this is much more comfortable track for track than the general melodrama of that other genre. Strong album!

Highlights: "I Don't Want to Hear It Anymore," "The Windmills of Your Mind," "In the Land of Make Believe," "Just A Little Lovin'" It bears repeating that there is no Diana Ross on this 1,001 albums list. None. Furthermore, this is a compilation album of other songwriters. Fuck off. Some great musical ideas, and Dusty's strong performances have lots of range and character. Minus points for evidently being culturally toxic enough to help whitewash this list.

Highlights: "Gimme Shelter," "You Can't Always Get What You Want," "Monkey Man," "Midnight Rambler" It cannot be unheard that somewhere during the recording of "Gimme Shelter," the guys decided 'hey, you know what would give this song about the slums some authenticity??? Somebody get us a black woman!' And so they dragged a pregnant Merry Clayton out of bed in the middle of the night, and she handed them their greatest hit by putting her talent to their appropriative bullshit. Only a few tracks measure up to the hits. Some interesting, restrained use of effects -- is that ring modulation on "Midnight Rambler"? -- and the minstrel gimmickry isn't as egregious as on Sticky Fingers, but it still runs on blues and country homage, and although their lyricism tends to be fairly strong it's much sloppier and free-associative for most of this album, sometimes beyond the Captain Beefheart parody. Not sure I'm ever going to hear the Stones album that makes me understand their critical acclaim. Guess you had to be there, hard-wired with the same assumptions and delusions that made this music.

Highlights: "Just," "Black Star," "My Iron Lung," "(Nice Dream)" Was surprised by the turn this takes in the second half. Thought this was chosen to represent a period of the band's more straightforward early work, but Greenwood's oscillating trail forays are even more pronounced on some of these tracks than on OK Computer, and Yorke gives much stronger and more impassioned performances here than he has for most of his career. They've never done anything much weirder or edgier than "My Iron Lung," but that's not really their strong suit. It doesn't linger on the creative, interesting choices that push this towards something more than an alt-rock record. It is still true that the album suffers from trying to have clear-cut and familiar song structures, and it doesn't have a cohesive arc as an album.

Highlights: "Little Child Runnin Wild," "Junkie Chase," "Give Me Your Love," "Think" It's hard to tell from another generation where this stands in the development of soul into funk and disco. It's six months after Al Green's "Let's Stay Together," three months before "Talking Book." Years after Sly and James Brown made their mark. But it's not quite like any of those records. It has a lot of Green, his gentle style of vocal delivery, his arrangements and some of his harmonic sensibilities, but it moves at Brown's fierce pace. To risk stating the obvious for a film soundtrack, it's also much more dramatic than those influences, which sends it somewhere closer to Wonder at times. Have to come down agreeing this sounds like an important landmark among a few shifting genres.

Highlights: "Hanging on the Telephone," "One Way or Another," "Fade Away and Radiate," "Heart of Glass" So many early New Wave hits came out this year, it feels like the origins of the genre must be somewhere else. But hits from 1977 like Marquee Moon and My Aim Is True don't have the same synthesized pop finish. Even Devo's debut this year isn't the sound they became a stereotype for. Blondie sounds ahead of the curve this way, with strong standouts on par with The Cars and Kraftwerk from a few months ago. On the other hand, they don't jump in with both feet. There's a lot of '50s pop and surf homage that hardly even gives the sound a punk update -- a little too faithful to its influences, more kitsch than camp. Still forward-thinking and high quality from front to back still, if a little bit front-loaded.

Highlights: "I've Got My Mojo Working," "Goodbye Newport Blues," "Tiger in Your Tank," "Soon Forgotten" 1960 is one of the greatest years in the entire history of all music ever made anywhere. After 100 years of blues music, its traditions had developed into world-historic, paradigm-shattering jazz compositions. So this all belies the pretended importance of Live in Newport as "the first electric blues record." You can hear from the audience, and from Waters, that the blues was alive, but this album had so much precedent, and was surrounded by superior and transcendent work that engaged with its same ideas. Just not up there in a list of all-time albums as far as I can tell.

Highlights: "How to Disappear Completely," "Idioteque," "Morning Bell," "Everything in Its Right Place" Mostly a stepping stone. A lot of fans must have never seen a favorite band lean out and make something as a studio object foremost, and to go more ambient with lots of 'free time' elements makes sense for a band that focuses on alienation, helplessness, and so on, but a band's successful exploration of a different sound doesn't amount to groundbreaking musical revelation. The main thing that's interesting about most of the pieces is the close harmonies of pads and strings as Greenwood explores Penderecki via Eno and the overall arrangements, getting taken by surprise but what creeps into the palette of the song next. Can't say for sure that this influenced music much other than to encourage people to try more atmospheric and dissonant work on a mainstream record, if that.

Highlights: "Time to Get It Together," "When Did You Stop Loving Me...Pt. 1," "Is That Enough," "You Can Leave..." Five years out from What's Going On, this can't take credit for anything fresh but retains the flaws and adds new ones. Later Gaye is all too diffuse. The band is tight except for clunky synths, but the lyrics just ramble hither and yon and peter out in the middle of nowhere. Everybody remembers the hooks, but 99.9% of people couldn't remember one of these songs front to back. And now Gaye lacks all his former energy. And all that lyrical dithering is embarrassing bitter breakup confessional that conveniently elides he's an incestuous statuatory rapist whenever it frets about what went wrong. And then there's the agonizing amount of spoken word in a quasi-Dylan sing-song. Awful. Only redeemed by the band, with strong grooves and compelling changes, which are mostly rehashes of past success.

Highlights: "Life's a Bitch," "The World is Yours," "One Love," "It Ain't Hard to Tell" Carrying the torch of ATCQ's hypnotic jazz loops with one of the most influential flows ever before Biggie hit. You can absolutely hear the influence of this album after the fact; you can hear his rivals, you can hear the rhymes cribbed by Doom, the turns of phrase plucked by Kendrick, and it's kind of hard to tell who shaped whose narrative flow between him and Wu Tang -- more of a dialogue. And it makes the right choice for such a verbally dense album by keeping itself concise at a blistering 40 minutes. Not totally timeless, but holds up even after so much imitation. Hip-hop has never gone back to the stiff rhyme on the two and four after this.

Highlights: "Dress," "Happy and Bleeding," "Plants and Rags," For so many 1-section songs, surprisingly diverse, if not always strong -- the opener might be the worst on the album. Some of the songs sound prescient of stripped down '00s mall rock, others are Siouxsie with a Sonic Youth veneer, and a few sound like the thrashier grunge of acts like The Toadies. Hard to call it all innovative, but there's lots of potential in the vocal performance and some strange harmonic choices. Decent quality throughout and some memorable pieces.

Highlights: "Heartbreaker," "Living Loving Maid" For an archetypal rock band, this album drags a lot. I hadn't thought of Zep as an especially "psychedelic" group, but spacey studio magic gimmick sections reminiscent of the Doors are a big flaw throughout the album. They're not tight either; you can hear the flubs on the attempts at Hendrix-y unison, and while the central drum solo of "Moby Dick" isn't as nightmarishly bad as that Bluesbreakers one, it pales in comparison to all a current listener's expectations. It doesn't help that the lyrics are comically ambivalent, with constant whiplash alternation between cooing about his sensitive free-spirited tender love and wildcat yowling about betrayal. Minus ten million points for writing about Gollum stealing his Mordor girlfriend. Are you kidding me? This is the band that got hippies into LotR? Abomination.

Highlights: "Stan," "The Real Slim Shady," "Remember Me?" This is at the head of the 90s-00s pointless edgelord pantheon with South Park. Exhibit A for the cliche: "satire requires clarity of purpose and target lest it be mistaken for and contribute to that which it intends to criticize." Genuinely culturally toxic, not because of exposing kids to every cuss and adult topic under the sun, but because of the mindless way that he tries to justify it. Dre's beats are uneven, with high highs and low lows. Like Eminem's bag of tricks, it can wear thin, especially after over an hour. Eminem has 3.5 barbs, jokes, and arguments he has harped on in every song over and over for his whole career. The two things he really contributes to rap are his dynamic, wild intonation and his rhetorically creative left turns to post hoc justify rhymes or advance a verse. You can get all that in Eminem Show without half the baggage of trash like "Kim".

Highlights: "Maggie May," "Mandolin Wind," "I'm Losing You" The compliment is that this could translate to a strong performance. The band knows how to switch up the feel in these never-ending gospel vamps to keep things moving. But it's a drag that's piggybacking on Stones and some classic soul with a different flavor of vocal performance at best. The most interesting point is a semi-madrigal interlude before Maggie May, but that is just another vanishing left turn like the baffling break into Amazing Grace. There's effort in the arrangements and some of the more reflective lyrics, and it picks up in the second half, but it rarely coalesces into an effective song.

Highlights: "Couldn't You Keep That to Yourself," "Split," "Tango Ballad" This just made me wish the songwriters were singing it. Costello and Cave have great voices for this stuff. Kate Bush fans will be able to handle the vocal bombast at face value, but Lemper's style matches better to campy, fantastical lyrics, and the problem is that a lot of the songwriting here is excellent. I want to enjoy the knot in my stomach from the bitter, cutting lyrics and cruel, shocking changes without being bowled over by this giant ham. In other words, the production is unmistakably late Walker. By the finale, it has lost its entire mind in a blathering juvenile morbidity but gets points for effort and musical daring.

Highlights: \"Levon,\" \"Madman Across the Water,\" \"Tiny Dancer\" The melodies are supposedly what carries Elton, but they're feeling samey for most songs here, even when the overall moods span far. Telling that it features a member of Yes, who suffers from the same problem in spite of all their skills. Maybe we could say he's pushing forward the blending of soul, rock, and showtunes, but it's hard to say how much of that was newer than The Beatles. Strong vocals, proficient sense of harmony, but baffling lyricism gets in the way more than it evokes something from the music, and his signature overwrites most of the distinct character between songs. It meanders and, as he says himself, wastes away.

Highlights: "Safe From Harm," "Blue Lines," "Five Man Army," "Unfinished Sympathy" Feel unfit to judge this when the history of dub influence is unclear. This predates other dub-influenced pop entries in the list like Portishead's Dummy and Sabres of Paradise's Haunted Dancehall. It's uneven but mostly comfortable except for some drags like "Be Thankful" and pretty diverse in styles. This would have to be a very early entry in the new baseline for heavy chill jazz '90s grooves, five months before ATCQ's Low End Theory. That has to count for something.

Highlights: "All Down the Line," "Tumbling Dice," "Rocks Off," "Stop Breaking Down" This messy, crowded production and an increasing use of winds and brass is what the Stones needed. Fits their style perfectly and feels like growth. As far as we've heard, their best album to date. Probably gets a third star just for being the most flattering representation of them. And this still would have already felt so dated by 72. It's that feeling again where I tell myself "well, it was a different time," but as soon as you put on another hit record from the same year you can realize that no, you don't have to settle!

Highlights: "Broadway Blues," "Space Church," "WRU," "Ecars" It's some combination of Coleman's craft and the way the giant room echo multiplies the heavy dueling parts that save this from provocateur saminess. It can be exhilarating, but maybe not groundbreaking by 1989. It's more expository of something groundbreaking. Again -- again -- where is Coleman's Shape of Jazz to Come on this list? Albert Ayler? Sun Ra? What is it about these editors that they have to filter jazz taste through rock and pop tie-ins? It's just insulting to their readers.

Highlights: "Mass Production," "Baby," "Nightclubbing," "Funtime" The blown out, filtered timbres from the guitars to the echoes have aged perfectly. Aspects of this mid-career Bowie style have continued to turn heads for decades, and something about hearing it through Iggy Pop gave it a darker turn; you can clearly hear the seeds of goth, no wave, and the '00s hard rock orbiting Reznor and Homme here. Most of the album drags, but the peaks are still shocking and chilling.

Highlights: "Been It," "Lovefool," "Never Recover," "Happy Meal" Respect to the Cardigans for leaning into basically everything that was not in fashion in the 90s: a blend of disco with bossa nova jazz and 50s pop. Does fall on its face in the last stretch, but mostly moves at an incredible pace, stopping its hooks on a dime and jumping right into the next one, with plenty of surprising twists on the way.

Highlights: "Welcome to the Jungle," "Sweet Child of Mine," "Mr. Brownstone" Axl Rose's falsetto is beyond parody. That has to be put aside before judging this. "Welcome to the Jungle" is a very well-constructed song, with all the makings of a hit. Can't say the same of the other hits on here. Van Halen and ACDC had been around for a decade; Metallica and Celtic Frost had been around for five years. It's just impossible to justify this pic unless this list were "1001 Singles You Have Probably Already Heard Before You Die". Slash's talent is holding this together, but the album is always some combination of samey, repugnant, and laughable.

Highlights: "My Generation/Medley," "Shaking All Over" Even if this were the only Who pick, it would make sense. The thing you always hear about them is that they were the loudest band on earth for a while, but it absolutely does not translate to the bulk of their studio recordings. Meanwhile, here you can hear the full force of a Univox Superfuzz devouring the midrange and some of the most effective bass solos I've heard from a rock band, with Moon managing to solo for entire songs without drowning the group out. Good performances. As far as rock history, you can hear a synthesis of a lot of major bands from the 60s that were actually pretty distinct from each other. This gets us closer to the generic hard rock baseline that persists to today.

Highlights: "Maybe the People Are the Times...," "Old Man," "The Good Humor Man" A weird amalgamation of psych and the studio pop and soul that came before it, a Jefferson Airplane with different strengths but many more weaknesses. The acoustic guitarwork can be pleasant, and the second half has better vocal delivery, but the first half had some really abysmal singing made worse by technically incompetent lyricism -- sometimes total disregard for meter, like they were written without hearing the music and shoehorned in. All throughout, there are issues with too many unsatisfying left turns repeated too many times. Comes across like a studio piggyback on the nascent Laurel Canyon scene, but you'd expect a band from LA to at least have its act together as musicians.

It's all been said. I come down feeling like it's a landmark of Hancock's development and not of music itself. It's hard to say where this fits in the development of "jazz fusion" between Weather Report and Return to Forever. It's more alternating than fused. He's one of the greatest musicians the world will ever have, and it's his greatest commercial success, but he'd admit it was an experiment and a test of his own range -- and range is one of the album's greatest strengths. It's heavily indebted, and he would continue to grow from here.

Highlights: "Passing Complexion," "Kerosene," "Cables" Cannot believe this is 1986. Very prescient of the hard lean into clipping throughout '90-'00s rock subgenres, from NIN and Deftones to Health and Xiu Xiu, while being catchier than work by Sonic Youth or Throbbing Gristle in this same period.

Highlights: "My Name Is," "Role Model," "Rock Bottom," "Bad Meets Evil" In these early albums, Eminem cannot find or deliver a hook to save his life. All the call-response phrases are so enervated and offbeat and just lie on top of the same old loop, killing all the momentum and making these 5-minute songs in a 20-song album feel like an eternity. The rapping on Eminem Show is generally weaker, but it made that much of a difference for Dre to create separate movements in a song and for Eminem to start belting out the lines. Maybe having less rap material even allowed him to focus on selling it better. This does manage to be better than the Mathers LP because 90% of those songs were reacting against the reaction to this album, while this album at least *establishes* things. Still awful, no matter how much clever internal rhyming he digs up. An Eminem album will give you a lot of insight into a certain prevalent kind of guy in this period, like Zeppelin would have done for the '60s. That doesn't make it good.

Highlights: "It's Tricky," "Hit It Run," "Raising Hell," "Dumb Girl" Doesn't seem like sampling contemporary rock hits was the best idea, because it really emphasizes how stiff this rap was by comparison. The way the guitar riff on "Walk This Way" is sampled off beat for the entire track is excruciating. The stripped-down sound seems like a resolute step backwards from the groove of Grandmaster Flash in 1982. The developments of overlapping vocals and whatever credit they can claim with scraching and beat style are overshadowed by all the other things we take for granted now. The best-aged track is ironically "Dumb Girl" for how stupefyingly intense and chaotic the 808 bass drum is by comparison to the rest of the album.

Highlights: "A Soldier's Things," "Johnsburg, Illinois," "Swordfishtrombone," "Rainbirds" Not Waits' best pound for pound, but full of diverse little vignettes that get at one of his big strengths of theatrical moodsetting. The dramatic keel of "Trouble's Braids" into "Rainbirds" is stirring, "Johnsburg, Illinois" showcases how he can use ugliness intentionally for characterization, with that drunken rubato on piano following sour notes in the vocals, and "Soldier's Things" marries lyrical form and content perfectly -- as good of a song as he ever wrote.

Highlights: "Fortune Teller," "Hoover Dam," "The Act We Act," "Helpless" It does take its transparent influence from Nirvana in another harmonic direction, and in doing so it's definitely nailing the general tone of Foo Fighters before Foo Fighters -- but there are almost no hooks, no breathing room for ideas, and the vocals are always hidden in a haze of modulation. Somebody needed to tell Mr. Mould that if almost all your songs are ABAB they probably shouldn't all be four to five minutes, especially if like "The Slim" it's more like ABAAAAAAAAAA. In spite of being a little ahead of the curve, it comes across extremely samey.

Highlights: "O Filsofo," "Meus Filhos, Meu Tesouro," "Taj Mahal," "Xica da Silva" This album is great, but might not be one for the history books when Wonder and Gaye were blending soul and funk with bossa nova back in '71. Without getting into Brazilian music history, it was already in fashion by this release, and African genres were on the way stateside. This was contemporary with Fela Kuti's Zombie. Probably the most important context. Another critic pick seemingly just affirming popular taste and commercial taste solely off the hit opener.

Highlights: "Movin' Out," "Get It Right the First Time," "Always a Woman," "Vienna" As a musical voice, he has trouble getting out from under McCartney and Wonder. The ideas that elevate him from schmaltz are very much in their style. Sure, he is a great performer. The songs have a lot of movement, and he knows how to grab the rhythm in phrases and pull a catchy melody out of them left and right. In that sense, using music to make thoughts felt, his lyrics are very good. But as a vaunted capital-s Songwriter he falls flat. Every song has absolutely zero subtext -- the nuance of a Wiki page about the title, and more than a little narrative confusion. Between the absence of a distinct personal style and any interesting non-musical ideas, it's just a good torchbearing.

Highlights: "Hurt" An album seemingly chosen for a famous single once again. What's weirder than a Cash album of mostly covers is that multiple covers here are rerecordings of covers he'd already done except with grander, more sombre arrangements. At least two of them feature in this list off the Folsom concerts. Like yeah dude, way to add reverb on the piano. Maybe another way of looking at it is this album has a lot of *contextual* meaning, this specific guy choosing to revisit this specific song at this specific point in the album, but that's a last resort of charitable interpretation. The sequencing is often strange, and some choices like "Personal Jesus" seem so against his themes that it must be something his publicist picked out. "Hurt" is the only choice that really sticks out as the kind of reflective intertext that would justify this album. It doesn't work.

Highlights: "Raining Blood" An attempt to outdo earlier heavy metal acts that succeeds in the wrong ways and comes out parody. Pretty monotonous and unmusical. Putting the snare so high in the mix on the offbeat is rough, but the guitar solos are the worst part: misguided maximalism that's not on the beat, doesn't have a melodic arc, doesn't regard the key, and recycles a handful of patterns and techniques over and over. When the vocals do this, sputtering as he rushes to finish an unrhyming couplet, it's at least funny.

Highlights: "Panama," "Girl Gone Bad," "Hot for Teacher," "Top Jimmy" Unfortunately, it's very good. Even on this last album, Eddie never phones it in. What sells each song more than his solos is his sharp and ornate rhythm work, and there are always some surprising changes thrown away in there. The non-singles are just as good. "Girl Gone Bad" was a surprise, building to a chill-inducing frenzy with the jazzier prelude, dissonant touches, relentless bass beat, and the backup vocals slamming the front of the chorus. But the studio magic like the mic'd up car in "Panama" and the bewildering quadruple bass drum of "Hot for Teacher" does take the already high energy of the album somewhere larger than life.

Highlights: "Powderfinger," "Ride My Llama," "Thrasher," "Hey Hey My My (Into the Black)" Ragged Glory would give us much more of the key sound here, but nothing there is as good a song as "Powderfinger," and this album feels more engaging and less monotonous because, like Stop Making Sense, it steadily builds and builds in ensemble and dynamics until it can't go higher, and then holding that energy feels more rewarding because it's been earned. The unexpected downside, also found on Ragged Glory, is much of the songwriting. Young can be uncomfortably uninhibited and leak out some deeply embarrassing pseudoironic ideas ("Pocahontas"), but it's also sometimes just erratic and unstable ("Sedan" and "Hey Hey"). Understandable that "Powderfinger" and "Into the Black" were historically raucous and raw guitar performances, where the gate is crumbling under a totally wrecked signal. We haven't really gotten dirtier than that; people have explored other flavors and frequencies, but what we have here is basically the limit.

Highlights: "Back Against the Wall," "Paid Vacation," "Wasted," "Live Fast Die Young" Narrowly coming in before Black Flag's Damaged; it's hard to imagine heavy metal of the '80s either without the flexible tempo rush of song climaxes throughout this album, and punk political messages have never fallen far beyond what this lays out. A highlight of an obviously highly influential scene.

Highlights: \"Only You Know\" Impossible to justify this as a must-hear album. Also bizarre to think Spector \"admired\" this voice, which is only just competent and forgettable except in how he makes the bewildering choice to imitate Bob Dylan's faltering glissando -- was this a mimetic dead end studios were chasing in the 60s-70s?? Maybe it is meant to represent the blithe pablum for which people came to hate Phil Spector.

Highlights: "Suicide" This album's reputation as a "godfather of shoegaze" explains a lot. A fake genre hallucinated by people who don't know what effects are, describing their own incomprehension of hardware, the push of a button, as a musical accomplishment. I do believe that you could give a random person an amp and a couple modulators and get this quality. One of the tracks in the middle really is just droning on a flanger. No reason to listen to this over anything else. Imagine if Suicide was stuck trying to be the Doors. Imagine if Jane's Addiction had no energy. Imagine if Lou Reed had nothing to say.

Highlights: "Porcelain" I only remembered him as being possibly the most forgettable bland music on 90s-00s radio, but the more I learned about him the worse it got. Sure Moby was a relentless sellout and a blatant appropriator of black culture, but on the other hand he was also living in Manhattan and creeping on teenage girls. I was looking for even one reason to actually listen to this, even one nice thing to say. You'd hope that such an anodyne, talentless album would at least age tolerably, but it's highly repetitive and marred by obnoxious file stretching artifacts that come off as incompetent today. He really does represent everything wrong with the music industry! Against the odds, a rare 1-star abomination. He can burn in hell with the critic that put him on this list.

So Trevor Horn and Anne Dudley have lead credit on all the tracks for production and keys and strings, and Sedevine and Just Allah are the rappers. McLaren is listed as the band's "figure caller." This early instance of "world music" is credited like a circus with him as a ringmaster. His musical role is at best a conductor, at worst just hollering his copyright watermark over these people between songs. You would have to call this "exotica" because it would only be cohesive to an insanely sheltered person. Was it their idea to call themselves "The Ebonettes"??? No wonder they sued him. I was definitely thinking of Graceland (3 years later) and I was horrified to realize McLaren's goblin hypeman delivery might have influenced David Byrne. Between the heinous context, genuine talent on display, and clear influence on later albums, I have looped around to conceding it is an Important Album. What's good about it musically is no credit to McLaren, and what's influential about it may be as much ill as good, however you want to read it into our culture afterwards.