Regardless of your feelings about young Robert James Ritchie, how many artists can say they were instrumental in the rise of both nu-metal and Auto-Tune? Making you sit through four Hans Zimmer instrumentals in between the two sets is pretty low, though. Strewn with AOR classics, no doubt, but for a band who's become close to synonymous with overblown stadium rock, you might be surprised by how frisky this set is -- whether REO is mixing power pop with Bo Diddley on "Don't Let Him Go," or throwing back to the girl group era with falsetto to match!
Jazzy enough to be released on Blue Note records, Come Away With Me hardly fits the usual bill as a Diamond album, but became enough of a sensation for its smooth sailing that it swept the Grammys and sold eight digits.
A stirred-up cauldron of Wagner, Spector and Andrew Lloyd Webber whose brew was potent enough to make an overweight, overzealous theater kid a rock god for at least one album.
Kenny G songs. The S. A staggering amount of the next 40 years of rock music can be traced back here in some way. Louis Blues hat. Ten was the sound of a grunge-era Seattle band that actually wanted to still be around a quarter-century later, and was willing to create the songs to merit such longevity.
The least fun that becoming the biggest band in the world has ever sounded, a mess of existential banality, contorted metaphors and vaguely hellish riffs. The national introduction of spunk-punk superstar Gwen Stefani could do with 10 percent less bloat and 20 percent less self-seriousness, certainly. More self-aware than Marshall Mathers , if not necessarily funnier: Eminem's third act asked that you finally pay some attention to the man behind the curtain. A record five Hot No. Jagged Little Pill may be the most undeniably human album to ever sell eight digits; a pigeonhole-proof statement from an artist who broke out with the bloodiest post-breakup anthem ever inspired by a Full House alum, and who turned her schizophrenic creativity into one of the cuddliest videos of the decade.
Taylor earned the title of her sophomore blockbuster with a collection of still-country-leaning pop-rock treasure maps that alternately engaged and disavowed her adolescent fantasies, playing the everygirl without obscuring the cunning and brilliance that allowed her to achieve a peerless level of self-realized success for an artist her age.
Which isn't to say Fearless is a guile-over-substance exercise, either: "Fifteen" and "Forever and Always" plumb the depths of high-school heartbreak from outside and in with equal devastation, while the sauntering "Hey Stephen" and stadium-aimed "You Belong Me" take wildly different routes towards proving that unrequited crushes don't need happy endings to be feel-good stories.
No blistering collection of paeans to youthful aimlessness has ever ended up foisting such a sense of purpose on a band — within a decade of Dookie conquering suburban America, Green Day were making rock operas protesting the Bush Administration. Nonetheless, it was dope enough to get sampled by both N. The album that cemented Zeppelin as the band that all future rock bands would at some point want to be; the quartet should get a yearly stipend from Sam Ash and Guitar Center.
The Beatles, Sgt. No LP opened up more possibilities for the format than Sgt. Pepper -- an album of dubious conceptual coherence but obvious sonic fluency, with peaks and valleys and an epic climax that remains unmatched in rock history. Life After Death posthumously turned the Notorious B. The country-pop crossover album that even made Garth sound like Steve Earle with its Mutt Lange-blessed largesse.
I Feel Like a Woman! Recently celebrating its 40th birthday and taken out on tour by its composer a couple years back, Songs in the Key of Life has the essential vitality to always bubble back up to the forefront of discussion. An EMP of negative energy unleashed by one man on his wife, his mother, his label, his fans, and -- last and absolutely least -- himself. The Marshall Mathers LP might stand as the last album to really make parents feel like one artist could single-handedly bring about the end of Western Civilization, and Eminem made his apocalyptic case with humor, hooks, and some of the most creative wordplay hip-hop has ever seen, creating a savage and frequently inexcusable masterpiece of not giving a f Your favorite song will never be the same from listen-to-listen, nor will your least favorite, but the overall stew is so rich that at a certain point you stop comparing bites anyway.
Sure, the six Bee Gees songs are all beyond-classic, but Saturday Night Fever endures as the definitive document of the disco era and ranks way higher here than Bodyguard because of how superlative the rest of it is, too. A soundtrack that actually makes for a more coherent cinematic experience than the film it accompanies, Purple Rain is certainly in contention for the most perfect album in rock or pop history, expertly flowing from track to track while delighting, surprising and astounding at each bend.
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Top Articles. Billboard Lists. By Andrew Unterberger. Copied to clipboard. Click to copy. Artists Mentioned. Kenny G, Breathless , 12x Platinum Some day, a smooth-jazz scholar will make the rounds informing us about why Kenny G was actually a genre innovator and stealth underground influence, shaming us for all the thoughtless jokes made at his expense over the years.
Nickelback, All the Right Reasons , 10x Platinum All the Right Reasons opens with the not-misleadingly titled "Follow You Home," featuring singer Chad Kroeger's promise that trying to murder him would merely slow down his stalking efforts, and follows that with "Fight for All the Wrong Reasons," in which Kroeger testifies that he'd leave his toxic relationship of "favorable slavery" if only his girlfriend would stop going down on him.
Its core aesthetic was like nothing in hip-hop: freshly butchered feelings enumerated in detail, but masked by digital processing; beds of spare synths used to balance a mix of singing and rapping. Drake cited West as his budding sound's "most influential person" when he was hustling mixtapes, while artists like Future further tweaked the idea of using Auto-Tune as a way to convey emotions that evoke too much feeling when spoken of explicitly.
O K Computer might be Radiohead's best album, and Kid A their most musically innovative, but In Rainbows shook the music industry's very infrastructure.
The band ended the four-year wait following 's Hail to the Thief by announcing simply on their official site, "the new album is finished, and it's coming out in 10 days. The album's "pay-what-you-want" offer that allowed diehards, casual fans and curious listeners to put their own value on music was just another step forward in questioning how the music business does business. When Mary J. Blige signed to Uptown Records, she began working with an up-and-coming producer named Sean "Puffy" Combs, and together they forged the idea of what came to be known as "hip-hop soul" —music with the emotional heft of the former, the sample-heavy breeziness of the latter, and the pop appeal of both.
The combination — not to mention Blige's powerhouse voice, which added extra gravitas to songs like the feather-light "Real Love" — resulted in cross-generational success. In the immediate, inspired the likes of Mariah Carey and Madonna to incorporate more hip-hop sensibilities into their brands of pop; but even two decades later, tracks like Ariana Grande's "Problem" and Charli XCX's "Boom Clap" operate in Blige's swaggering shadow. Everything you thought you knew about hip-hop changed in a flash, thanks to an album from a former West Coast electro producer.
Dre's lush, studio-recorded instruments seemed huge compared to the last decade of drum machines and sample collections. The album sold a world to white America that it had never really seen before, and packaged it with a soundtrack so funky there was no avoiding it.
It was both raw, uncut underground and carefully composed pop. For the first time ever, hip-hop's mainstream and America's were one. A seemingly conservative maneuver that turned out to be cutting edge. In a world of house and techno driven by dance-floor whims — especially in rave-addled England — Warp Records were driven by the bottom line when they decided to market a "home listening" version of electronic music: Comfortable, older, middle-class types liable to buy an living room record were a more reliable audience for CD sales than trend-chasing kids.
However Artificial Intelligence served as a handy gathering point for some of electronic music's most experimental minds — Aphex Twin, Autechre, Richie Hawtin, Alex Paterson from the Orb — a brainy exercise that spawned what we now know as "intelligent dance music. It won countless races, including the first-ever Daytona in It was a bike like nothing else.
Nirvana weren't the first indie heroes to sign a major label the Replacements, Tim , , or the first to subsequently hit Number One R. While conscientious writing was already a part of the rap game, for Public Enemy's Chuck D, it was the game.
By putting his group's message up front — pro-black, anti-drug, pro-revolution, anti-war — it cemented hip-hop itself as part in the lineage of black revolutionary literature everyone from Tupac Shakur to Killer Mike owes a debt of gratitude.
The revolution wasn't just political. The Bomb Squad's shrill, punk-provocative production underlined the urgency, expanding what you could do with samples, layering funky breaks until they became weapons of noise and chaos.
Not only the first classic hip-hop album, but a sharp breaking point from the buoyant post-disco rhythms and future-shocked electro that dominated the genre's first five years on record. The Hollis, Queens crew did nothing short of reinvent the still-new style in their own image: hard, raw, in your face and catchy enough to challenge anything else in pop.
The rap-rock fusion "Rock Box" stands as a foundationally transformative moment for American culture itself, while the earth-shaking one-two punch of "Sucker MCs" and "It's Like That" which had been released together in a landmark single segued from Herculean MC grandstanding to complex social realism. The album is minimal and stark, but still feels like an audacious good time.
While compilation albums were nothing new, the U. The 30 songs on Now's first volume filled two LPs, and the albums' compilers took enough of a wide-lens view on the idea of "pop" to offer unexpected left-turns: Culture Club, Rod Stewart, Mike Oldfield and the Rock Steady Crew all shared a side. The American version launched in with an album starring the Backstreet Boys and Radiohead.
Accordingly, the series has remained possibly the only safe bet, weathering 30 years of changes in the music industry: The 50th American edition released this year was the 18th in the series to debut at Number One — only the Beatles have more. It's hard to imagine the present-day musical landscape without Thriller , which changed the game both sonically and marketwise.
The album's nervy, outsized blend of pop, rock and soul would send seismic waves throughout radio, inviting both marquee crossovers like Eddie Van Halen's guitar solo on "Beat It" and sneakier attempts at genre-meshing. The album's splashy, cinematic videos — from the John Landis-directed short film that promoted "Thriller" to the West Side Story homage accompanying "Beat It" — legitimized the still-nascent form and forced MTV to incorporate black artists into its playlists.
Its promotional strategy, which led to seven of its nine tracks being released as singles, raised the bar for what, exactly, constituted a "hit-laden" LP. Beyond breaking ground, it broke records, showing just how far pop could reach: the biggest selling album of all time, the first album to win eight Grammys in a single night and the first album to stay in the Top 10 charts for a year.
Part heady avant-garde improv, part well-considered Molotov cocktail, all ways disorienting, Throbbing Gristle's debut steamrolled a new path for underground noiseniks by eschewing most of the formal rules of rock music — drums, guitars, melody and, on Side B, pulse entirely —going directly for the primal appeal of distortion. Built on disturbing samples, disturbing electronic textures, and disturbing live recordings, Second Annual Report employed the LP as a medium of portable transgression.
Not only was The Ramones one of the first, finest and clearest documents of a still-forming genre — punk rock — it was one of the first albums to combine market-tested pop music with stuff that most people would call "noise" a gesture that, in the long run, had more to do with Weezer than Black Flag. Add to that the radical notion that their constraints short songs, no guitar solos, leather jackets and jeans, "I don't wanna"-style lyrics were also the source of their freedom, and you get an album that rejected tradition in part by embracing it.
Kraftwerk's savvy use of pop elements smuggled in a Trojan horse of electronic experimentalism to the broadest audience possible.
Most pop genres that followed would incorporate this innovation — new wave, hip-hop, techno and contemporary EDM among them. The German group pulled away from rock music's formal identity while channeling its to-the-jugular pop spirit on Autobahn. They focused on the pulse first and foremost, slowing the tempo down to match the title track's concept, reflecting the feel and sounds of driving down the German autobahn.
The concept's irreverence was balanced by the neutral German imitation of Beach Boys harmonies. Before the soundtrack for The Harder They Come , reggae's success in America was limited to the occasional fluke 45 e.
In turn, the soundtrack served not so much as a venue for a hot new sound, but a diplomatic introduction to something that had been percolating for years. When Henzell asked Cliff to get on it, Cliff said "no," at which point Henzell got into bed with a notepad and started running the film back and forth in his head, writing down song titles.
The party line on Gaye's album is that it was the first time soul music approached the condition of art — as though Motown's pocket symphonies didn't require as much wit and invention as any of the more exploratory music contained herein.
What the album did do, however, was take music mostly associated with showmanship and personal pain and recast it as music of social and reportorial insight — a shift that not only prefigured the casual, ear-to-the-ground persona of singers like Erykah Badu, but Nas, Common and an entire universe of black musicians whose concerns don't stop at the studio doors.
This blockbuster's 15 weeks at Number One — a record for a female solo artist that held for more than 20 years — helped establish the idea of the Laurel Canyon singer-songwriter as a commercial force, and that's probably its least interesting accomplishment. A decade earlier, King's songwriting collaborations with then-husband Gerry Goffin expanded the emotional palette of pop romance. In , not yet 30, she showed how those pop sentiments could remain relevant for adults, revisiting the lingering uncertainty of "Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow" and expressing even-tempered resignation on "It's Too Late.
On their second album, the Allman Brothers transmogrified from mere blues-rockers to an assemblage creating an entirely new kind of Southern music. It helped to have the preternaturally sweet slide guitar of brother Duane, but Idlewild South offered open-source blueprints for the Allmans' longhaired brethren across the region and beyond, including Eric Clapton, who promptly drafted Duane for Derek and the Dominos' Layla and Assorted Love Songs. No one ever quite replicated Allman and Dickey Betts' soaring guitar harmonies, but Idlewild South enabled in part Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Black Crowes, almost every jam band, Kid Rock and whoever is playing for beer and glory tonight at the nearest biker bar.
Miles Davis had recorded electric jazz before, but Bitches Brew was something else: jazz-rock. Accepting the rhythmic and improvisatory challenges of Jimi Hendrix, James Brown and Sly Stone, the trumpeter, over the course of several sessions, goaded multiple large combos to use a shifting funk pulse to guide them toward explorations more open-ended than even the freest of jazz players had attempted. When Black Sabbath released their self-titled debut in , they didn't think they were starting a movement.
But worse" in Rolling Stone. But their sludgy take on psych-blues became the core of what's now known as metal — whether modified by "thrash," "prog" or even "glam. That contributed to a doom-filled atmosphere that was only enhanced by frontman Ozzy Osbourne, who was still refining his "prince of darkness" persona, and song titles grasping toward signifiers of evil.
Not merely an afterthought to a studio recording, the double-LP was a testament to the power of live music and, more specifically, an advertisement for the Dead's ever-changing show. As the first in a flood of live Dead releases, it began to map out strategies for entrepreneurial juggernauts from Pearl Jam to the Dave Matthews Band, an advertisement for deeper pleasures that might only be achieved with the additional purchase of one or many concert tickets.
A path-finding moment in the pre-history of hip-hop, the debut album from this Los Angeles poetry collective — full of minimalist beats and brilliant wordplay nearly a decade before the first recorded rap song — still feels relevant 45 years later. The finest track on The Black Voices is its funniest, the eminently sample-ready, five-second salvo "The Meek Ain't Gonna" in which Hamilton explodes with the single line "The meek ain't gonna inherit shit… because I'll take it!
Never had rock music been so fussy or so technical, forgoing the pleasure of the moment for the rarefied pursuits of multi-song suites and breakdowns in time signatures no teenager would dare try to do the mashed potato alongside.
For the first prog-rock LP, an Atlantic Records ad run in Rolling Stone in late claimed it featured the heaviest riffs on record since Mahler's 8th Symphony. It was a year of tumult for Stax: Otis Redding has just passed away, and their entire catalog was being absorbed by Atlantic Records.
Hayes reluctantly agreed to record another LP for Stax, with the caveat of having complete creative control — a rare opportunity for a soul musician at the time, but after Hot Buttered Soul's wild success, a necessity. It became soul music's first album-length auteur statement: four tracks spread over 45 minutes that blended pristine production, Memphis soul courtesy of the Bar-Kays, orchestral flourishes and one of the richest, bluesiest voices ever.
Rock's late-Sixties psychedelic sojourn was brought to a screeching halt with the August release of the first country-rock masterpiece, an album whose reverberations can still be heard in the hard-rocking sounds of virtually every current country hit. The commercial success of the Eagles, America, the Doobie Brothers are all attributable to fledgling Byrd Gram Parsons's resolute belief in the cosmic power of real country music. Parsons fan Elvis Costello brought the word back to the punks on Almost Blue ; the Blasters, Long Ryders and even X added a twang to their sound; and "cowpunk" became a thing.
Likewise, Uncle Tupelo's No Depression album; band spinoffs Wilco, Son Volt and Bottle Rockets; and countless subsequent alt-country advocates can all be traced back to Sweetheart.
Loretta Lynn's seventh album was named for her first Number One country hit, a feminist volley that established her persona as a country gal earthy enough to acknowledge the indignities she and her down-home sisters faced and fearless enough to stand up for herself. There had been no-nonsense women country stars before, of course, but Kitty Wells and Patsy Cline to choose just two obvious antecedents never had a gold album.
And Lynn's new commercial clout was a direct result of her songwriting talent: Her name is on the hit that anchors this album, which not only established her as a creative force but opened up new possibilities in a male-dominated market for generation of female country tunesmiths to follow, from Dolly Parton to Taylor Swift. The engineers took the heart and soul of the concept and translated it into metal designed to go like nothing else.
Pepper's came out, the entire Yale and Harvard student body bought copies. Pepper's wasn't the first album to blend rock music with high art, but it was probably the first time that musicians of the Beatles' stature and popularity if there even were musicians of their stature and popularity before them decided to turn their back so completely on what had made them famous.
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