I don't know if you need to declare that, before you die, you must hear music that has never gone away. It's like saying "You GOTTA breathe this atmosphere while you are here!" Pretty sure every human hears "Smooth Operator" at least once a week during the process of being alive. And it is flawless. "Your Love is King" only slightly less flawless and thereby more interesting. I wonder if they have to pay Roxy Music's holding company for style royalties. I've always kinda dug the nagging persistence of "Hang on to Your Love", a ballad from a barnacle to a Nantucket whaler of a love. "Cherry Pie" is the secret subdued disco banger hidden in here. As is the audacious conga minute opening of Timmy Thomson's minimalist classic "Why Can't We Live Together." I want to hear that gliding around a roller rink on the moon.

It's hard to not read this album as one long suicide note so that clouds it for me. It's their most cohesive, but least hooky record. It always makes me feel the next Nirvana album would've been the one.

This album feels it was put together by record execs and it was one of the times they got it absolutely right. They didn't know what to do with Blondie so they did everything and it worked.

I always think Isaac Hayes is gonna be funkier than he is.

Perhaps the most glaring example of the Springsteen Problem - great songs undone by terrible arrangements

Heard this when it came out walking into a record store and started to ask what it was and the cute girl behind the counters just went shhh and sold it to me.

This feels like a vanload of ideas trying to be a band. I wasn't sure if it was for me until I heard the reggae number and knew it was not

This is the Black Sabbath album that belongs here.

This album would be four stars even without Sultans of Swing, one of the best songs ever. Mark Knopfler is one of the sliest of modernists, gently coaxing us into the (then) new wave.

I feel I am about to pay too much for these sunglasses listening to this.

I don't remember this at all but "Richard III" is a great track two jam. I would've been into this at the time.

perfect but loses a point for the line in Oliver's Army. He knew exactly what he was doing when he put it in there.

Actually been listening to this and Straight No Chaser a lot this week. TM is so great at making a broken melody sound complete

I get why people think Sufjan is too much but I love this and the Michigan album and Seven Swans all the way. "John Wayne Gacy" and "Casimir Pulaski Day" both can make me cry when I'm in a human mood.

Def not the Black Sabbath album I would pick. I was really hoping to discover the Smithereens' "Behind the Walls of Sleep " was a Sabbath cover but no dice.

I had "Promised You a Miracle" on a high school mixtape from an exchange student and the jam sounds as fresh today. The rest is OK.

I love this album with my whole heart, though I always think about the look they must have had on their faces when Bob Dylan popped in saying "Hey I made this painting for the cover! You guys like it? You can be honest with me!"

Charlie Brown Xmas music for the discerning Quaalude user.

The thing I like about TS is that when she's derivative (maybe always) she puts her whole self into it. It's literally not for me, but the people it is for get all of it.

oof. Let AI do 80's retro

You could hold you own discussing pop music from 1930-1970 having only heard this album. He created trop rock (Coconut) and hair metal (Jump into the Fire) on the same record in his bathrobe.

It's the greatest Lou Reed solo album and maybe the 3rd best David Bowie album

Pretty perfect

This album is an easy win, nearly perfect and even better for the places it isn't. A friend of mine formed a Television cover band and did this whole album live once and revealed the 70s boogie that lies inside those icy guitar lines, which only made me love it more.

I'm picturing a post-Tommy The Who marching across Mordor, triumphant with banners aloft, legions in their wake when there is a wisp of white smoke over a golden hill and Queen gallop in like the four horsemen of rock opera and cut through Townsend's flank like it's warm butter. Sure, the Who will win the war, but for a moment, this one unit had them by the throat. "Is that a sitar *and* a vocoder?" Cmdr. Townsend gasped as Freddie's Daltrey impression on "The Loser in the End" stole the actual Daltrey's girl even though he didn't really want her. Brian May is in full wizard frenzy, lightning bolts and whirlwinds. No one knows the names of the other two, heroes anonymously mourned by rhythm sections for time immortal.

I'm a Bob Dylan type, but on the fence about this classic. There are great rambly numbers like Stuck Inside of Mobile and Leopard Skin Pill Box Hat but dreary slogs like Visions of Johanna and Lowlands. Too much harmonica. If you hate his singing, wait 'til you get a load of his harmonica playing! Loses a star for Rainy Day Women 12 & 35 - the dumbest things he's done, including his boutique whiskey line. But gets it back for the hair/stare/scarf combo on the cover.

The third best album by the Band after Big Pink and Stage Fright. I'm a fan, but could get by in life without ever hearing The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down again. Across the Great Divide is a weedy beauty of a song. A lot of the rest runs together much like the cars in a demolition derby. I though I hated Up on Cripple Creek for years until I listened to it on purpose. The recently departed organist Garth Hudson really shines on this record.

Dolly Parton albums tend to be, erm, front-loaded with whatever her single was at the time and a lot of filler, but this is one of the exceptions. I love the one-two punch of a mother’s love in the title track and the high camp of her mama stealing her secret boyfriend in “Traveling Man.” “The Mystery of the Mystery” is country gospel existentialism of the highest order. “Early Morning Breeze” is a spooky beauty that could have been a Lee Hazelwood cut or even a VU b-side.

They are really putting you Dylan/Band haters through the paces. This is a classic I never come back to bc who needs to hear “Blowin’” ever again? It is laden and lugubrious with folk reverence and watching Bob develop his shtick in real time, but “A Hard Rain” and “Don’t Think Twice” are total bangers.

Produced by Charlie Daniels - that's his devil-trouncing fiddle on "Darkness, Darkness." It's an affable progressive folk-rock record, wide in its stylistic reach and expertly played and produced, but it doesn't really feel like even the band are that excited about it, which makes me wonder if they were on it or was this done by CD and session musicians. The "come on people now, smile on your brother" debut album is better and sounds like a band. I think you can safely die without hearing this one. "Ride the Wind" is lounge magic, though.

Weird choice for 1001 given that Primal Scream has two other legit decade-defining classic LPs in Screamadelica and XTRMNTR. Seems like it was put together to re-sell the Trainspotting single, which is mostly good for the Jean-Jacques Perry sample it is built on.

One of my favorite albums ever. A magnificent, ragged sprawl in answer to the well-mannered smorgasbords other bands were making at the time. Death of the sixties dirty bomb. The bit from "Rocks Off" - the sunshine bores the daylights out of me - is one of the best lyrics in music. You may think this album is a mess, and you'd be right, but Three-Ball Charlie up on the cover knows what's up.

"Rikki" is a pretty solid groove if you wish Wings was meaner. "Night by Night" is for people who wish Wings wasn't so funky. "Any Major Dude" is the about the eighth best Wings song ever. The rest of the album is on par with Wings' Venus and Mars. If comparing Steely Dan to Wings doesn't reduce your Dannist adversary to a stutter, substitute Styx in there.

Unstoppable banger. It sounds as fresh today. Sure, it owes pretty much everything to George Clinton, but I suspect George Clinton owes more back to this album for how its made his thing eternal.

There was a week there back then when I thought RatM was the second coming, but I was having a bad week. They were a little too alpha for me. Fugazi for skaters who would go into finance.

Unimpeachable. Best performance on a jug. Do not operate a forklift or other heavy machinery while listening to this album.

Any song I've ever thought was a great Suede single turned out to be by another band. That mixtape is 5*. Those songs actually by Suede, or perhaps just their press presence, always seem to project more cleverness than they actually have. A less-committed Smiths. Echo and the, well, just echo of better English bands from 10 years before. Probably sounded great in a bar in 93.

I wish Kendrick Lamar would take over the contemporary pop musical mantle from the Hamilton guy. This album feels like the soundtrack of one I'd actually want to see. He raps like someone executing a flawless parkour routine, bouncing off buildings and jumping off balconies and landing in a casual strut.

Not the Beastie Boys album I would pick nor really have ever gone back to. It has more of the weedy rock haze that I'd associate with Check Yr Head or Ill Communication than I remembered, particular the opening track. The longer songs feel endless, a purgatory spent in the New Style and not getting sleep til Brooklyn. "She's Crafty" came out a few months after Run DMC's "Walk This Way" and it felt like the whole world was sing song like this and like that. The deep cuts can stay there, the hits will be omnipresent as long as white people are still on earth. "Girls" still kinda cracks me up.

Another weird choice for a band who has a much more classic album, or at lease one that has their signature songs. This sounds like one of those later Squeeze albums - perfectly alright, they are pros, but you barely remember while you are listening to it, much less after.

Any plural-bird-name band without a definitive article is gonna be unfairly compared to Swans in my mind. Doves are no Swans. They remind me of the Mighty Lemon Drops, a perfectly fine band I saw open for three different touring acts one year in college: affable, nice texture, but if you stuffed any calendar page from their year into a CD player, 2002 in Doves' case, this is what it would sound like. I like the percussionless "M62 song" and "Where We're Calling From" the best, so maybe the drums are the key to their blending in to the woodwork. "N.Y." betrays a grunge inclination masked in synth strings, winding into a nice arpeggiated guitar. But a lot of nice, not a lot of wow.

"Connection" was omnipresent for a while, like it was put together by a marketing team for maximum impact in the bar 'n' grill background music sector for Q1 '95 , but maybe I never heard anything else by them. The rest of the album sounds like a much more fun band. The songs are barely formed in the best way, each consisting of a good hook, an expertly shoplifted Joy Division or Fall or Stranglers quotation, a cool noise and a sing-song swagger.

It is impossible to hear "Everybody Wants to Rule the World" with fresh ears, but the Teutonic march of much of the rest of the album still hits for me. Yes, "Shout" is ridiculously serious but they do it enough times to wear you down which is a triumphant twining of pop art's form and function. Yes there is a lot of sax in the non-hit recesses. Yes, they are not particularly fun but it was the twilight of the Reagan and Thatcher eras. Yes, it sounds like Yes did in 1985, with all the orchestra breaks. I don't know if I'm making excuses for them or for me, but it still sounds fresh for being so dated.

I don't know if you need to declare that, before you die, you must hear music that has never gone away. It's like saying "You GOTTA breathe this atmosphere while you are here!" Pretty sure every human hears "Smooth Operator" at least once a week during the process of being alive. And it is flawless. "Your Love is King" only slightly less flawless and thereby more interesting. I wonder if they have to pay Roxy Music's holding company for style royalties. I've always kinda dug the nagging persistence of "Hang on to Your Love", a ballad from a barnacle to a Nantucket whaler of a love. "Cherry Pie" is the secret subdued disco banger hidden in here. As is the audacious conga minute opening of Timmy Thomson's minimalist classic "Why Can't We Live Together." I want to hear that gliding around a roller rink on the moon.

This is a jam. There's points where I wanna say this sounds like disco or Talking Heads and realize, oh yeah, other way around.

This is one I've tried to get into over the years as it has been cited as a foundation document for a lot of the music I like, but I dunno. Like much new wave pop, the songs are one minute of a good idea dragged out to five. If "Rip It Up" was 2:30, it'd be perfect. Time and place, this honkylypso would have been an excellent antidote to very serious punk in 1982 Scotland but most of it hits me like the other songs on a Police or (English) Beat album.

Love the early drunken reveler Fairport Convention records. The best thing the Byrds ever did was convince FC to plug in their guitars. The slower ballads get a bit arch, but it's so good when they swing into gear. Some of the instrumentation (partic "Matty Groves") would not be out of place on the first couple of VU records.

What I want to hear walking in a bar or coffee shop mid afternoon. The kind of vocal jazz you passively listen to or actively ignore. I'm a little fixated on the R on the marquee on the cover. Was it just like that when they took the photo or did some art director have a brilliant idea right before or was there a transfer letter screw up?

Bangers all around. Even the tired ones you've heard 100 million times hit like a brick when you listen to them on purpose.

Love this album. This album has become something an indicator of an alt-country lifestyle choice, but it really is a beautiful record every time.

Hmmm, I’d say if you need a Janet Jackson album before you die, the one with “Nasty” and “What Have You Done For Me Lately” from a couple years before is the one with cultural impact. The video for the title track was better than the song.

I love Rufus Wainwright for his candor and wit as much for his voice, but this album has a little too much remove for it to grab me. Poses is the RW for me, particularly "Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk", one of the best songs ever.

In my dream life, it would be southern California weather and we would all get around on roller skates and this album would be the default soundtrack being broadcast on transistor radios laying around everywhere.

Despite having seen this album cover my whole life, I'm just now noticing he's wearing a hoodie. Always something to discover in Bowie. "Sound and Vision" is one of his best songs, "Speed of Life" his best groove, "Be My Wife" a terrific song I forgot about, "Warszawa" a fully realized chamber piece, and "Weeping Wall" one of his most successful experiments. With all that, a lot of the rest feels a little unfinished, which is in its own right a brave move for a perfectionist, but I'd like to hear "Breaking Glass" as the juggernaut it wants to be.

I was hoping to die without listening to a whole Marilyn Manson album but life if full of little disappointments. Plus, I feel MM wants you to die listening to his music. Like the photoshop cover and word-burrito song titles, this feels like a pastiche meant to evoke a mood it doesn't quite deliver. He seems to be a horrible person, so maybe he should have dug into that. This is all strobe light and no chainsaw. I do see why guitarist John 5's picture is on the wall at my local Guitar Center, for what that's worth.

A lot wiggier than I remember this being. The last four minutes of "Don't Call Me..." could go, as could all of that fill-the-album-time-with-cocaine of "Sex Machine" but the rest are all hits for a reason.

My third favorite Pixies album after Surfer Rosa and Trompe L' Monde, only by narrow and situational margins. It took me a while to fully come around to the Pixies bc I was a snooty college DJ at the time of their ascendancy and suspicious of anything that other people liked. This group's lara7 and I picked up a tape of Surfer Rosa at a yard sale and driving around to that won me over. Years later I took a road trip with a friend who only brought two tapes - Trompe L'Monde and Blondie's Greatest Hits which cemented that one. But Doolittle is the right entry point, their catchiest, their most aliens-recreate-rock'n'roll-in-their-language.

Electric Warrior sits imperious in the perfect brilliant/stupid singularity toward which all rock music tends. His folkier music before this is delightfully ridiculous, his heavier music after this is as subtle as a werewolf howl on the moors but this record is a like a lit cigarette trapped in amber - perfect distilled coolness.

There's Bob Marley albums I like better, and reggae artists I like better than Bob Marley, but this is an OK one. Plus, it's good to listen him like this on purpose, outside of the omnipresence of his hits in every stoner-adjacent fast casual restaurant and dorm room. As a musician, I aspire to the ironically dead-ass organ sounds on "Lively Up Yourself" and it's impossible to not feel it will be when the "Everything's gonna be alright" repeats hit. Everything won't be, but it's a great template for compassion. There is non-insignificant quantities of filler on this record but "Bend Down Low" is a great party percolator I don't think I've heard before.

What a beautiful ridiculous band! Quiet Riot seems even more weird a phenomenon knowing that their hits were Slade covers. This album is so-so, but their singles are solid. They wrote the best rock'n'roll Christmas song ever but it's not on this album. If you are looking for glam rock you need to hear before you die, allow me to direct you to Mott the Hoople.

The presence of this and License to Ill implies that Check Your Heard is on the list, further indicating more Beastie Boys that you might need in one life where other hip hop exists. Side A - through "The Update" is so good, showing their range and command of a banger. The latter half kinda hits like a YouTube beat tape I'd put on to ignore get some work done.

This one-man jam session is a lot to take unless you are really invested in the nexus of jazz, minimalism, and new age as well as advances in recording piano overtones in a room. I bet 25% of the people in Köln that night had their life changed and the other 75% were looking at their watch and questioning the renewal of their season tickets. I'm into it, but I get why you aren't.

Six out of five stars for the Cars. "Let them brush your rock'n'roll hair" alone puts this album among the constellations and it's not even from the best song, which is "Just What I Needed" - the best rock song ever. If Buddy Holly hadn't died in a plane crash but instead fell into a wormhole to the future and came back to 1978 as Ric Ocasek to show us the way.

There is a Chuck Klosterman quote about the first Van Halen album being the perfect average rock record - anything worse than it is bad, anything better is good. Foo Fighters are the embodiment of the Hagar-era of that metric.

This is the Pixies record that never really grabbed me. All the brio and egregious reverb usage of the Cult, the lyrical inscrutability of extreme metal band and the no-eye-contact of a band that might open for Kraftwerk. There are some great hooky numbers like "Hang Wire" and "Dig for Fire" and "Is She Weird" - the best Violent Femes song they never wrote - but I find myself skipping a lot of the rest.

This album is catchy as a gill net and content-free as that same net pulled out of an unstocked lake. Practice frame for Oasis, who knew where the big fish were.

This album is good, but the Live: P-Funk Earth Tour album that came out of this material is the real must-listen Parliament record. The beat on the studio version gets monotonous, but with an entire 1977 LA Forum stomping along, it reaches the cosmic.

"Do It Again" is why audiophile stereos were invented, but then audiophile stereos are what gave us the subsequent Steely Dan albums which gave us the 80's Wall Street greed era which begat tech bros and Elon Musk. So despite "Do It Again" being a stone jam, one must gaze at the album through the dolorous lens of history and stall the waterwheel of unlearned-from mistakes. Let us not be the fools doing the Dan's dirty work. Plus the non-single tracks are so-so.

The side-two medley is the last gasp of their greatness, but a lot of side one is a tired sigh. Even in my most Beatle-adoring youth, "I Want You" gave me the ick, and "Oh! Darling" too saccharine. I've always wished they'd worked more, perhaps, collaborated with purpose, on "Come Together" which is a great song with dumb lyrics. "Here Comes the Sun" is perfect and "Octopus" and "Maxwell" are dopey and fun.

I love Prefab Sprout. A master class in mass-appeal idiosyncratic art-pop. Those synths are an anchor in the harbor of 1985, the only thing keeping this album from being timeless. I have had "Appetite" in my head since I saw the video in high school and I'm still not sure what its about. The only real digs I have against this album is how front-loaded it is and those gated drums, but it's how the world was back then.

This is still a beautiful, singular album, but damn those songs take forever. No wonder she's always late for her shows.

Masterful performance and recording but I cannot imagine a situation where I would not feel ridiculous putting this on, save being a ATF agent tasked with driving a doomsday cult from their compound.

Low-key one of my favorite Radiohead albums. I love the shaky rage, the introspection harmonies, the way the digital aspects flood in through the cracks of a rock band. Phasers set to melancholy. Also, the best album cover for a band that makes definitive album cover statements. It's not the Titanic-sinking iceberg that OK Computer or In Rainbows are, but I love how it looms out beside you in the fog.

This album will make you understand why the entire boy's club of early punk fell completely in love with Patti Smith. I go back an forth about whether this or Radio Ethiopia is my favorite - this is more feral, the latter rocks harder - but she was an electromagnetic rock creature radicalizing knuckleheads everywhere.

It's a pretty, breezy record but The Three EPs, made famous by the same movie that needlessly steered a generation away from the pleasures of Belle and Sebastian, is the one you need to hear.

I mean, c'mon. If you don't give this five stars, you are clearly not ready for star time

How did they not do a James Bond theme? Like a lot of trip-hop, it feels highly derivative in the best possible way, like an expertly filled plate at the buffet that makes your tablemates go "Ooooh, I didn't see the dumplings!". Alison Goldfrapp is a true songbird, the production is smart and in just the right part of her shadow. Great Theremin usage. This was a delightful surprise.

This was one of the records my mom bought after the divorce, along with a lot of Neil Diamond, so it is woven into my upbringing. It's a beauty of a standards collection. I was going to list the Willie albums I prefer, ones that lean on his original material, but then "Blue Skies" came on, and I thought why would I want anything else? It stops just outside the city limits of treacle, elevating the tiredest of songs with a weary, elegant resignation. It's making something out new of what's left. If you can't open your heart to his version of "All of Me" you may want to have a doctor confirm you have one. This version of "Unchained Melody" is what plays should our wretched souls ascend to heaven at the end. So yeah, essential. Produced by his neighbor Booker T (of and the MGs), recorded in another friend's house, with the harmonica recorded in a shower stall. Also I love that he insisted on keeping Susanna Clark's (wife of songwriter Guy Clark) signature on the cover painting.

It's difficult to listen to this as a thing unto itself with it being peak "rap older white people listen to and reference." But unzip that baggage, the energy and anger is still potent. It's a monotonous listen, but then that same-damn-thing-every-day-ness is what it seeks to express. I feel the singles are maybe more important to hear than the full album.